For you GI's that were stationed in USAEUR

Standard Army political garbage.

Standing up a Corps HQ in Kentucky is just a jobs program for GOs, field grades, and sergeants major. It's not doing anything to stop anybody from anything.

Add a brigade combat team or three, and a combat aviation brigade, and stick them somewhere like Poland.

 

I was part of an Air Force MOD detachment that operated along the Fulda Gap at the border between West and East Germany. It was a joint Air Force-Army unit that performed mobile electronic signals intelligence. At the time the Fulda Gap was the front line of the Cold War. There were 200,000 Soviet troops within ten miles of our location. If the Cold War turned into a hot war the Soviet army would attack at that point. Now the line has been moved east to Poland and Ukraine. It is interesting how times change.

 

Yes it is. The Warsaw Pact and Soviet Cold War strategy relied on satellite states to absord the damage, in a future war, that the Soviets felt from Germany in WWII.

Now many of those former satellite states would welcome US bases as a block to Russia. Germany has made it clear that they don't really want us around, and throw up regulations to make training more onerous.

Poor Poland, stuck between Russia and an increasingly socialist Germany. The Baltic states are in an equally precarious spot.

And our solution is a 600 member general staff in Kentucky. Shameful.

 

Oh, and the legend of our Cold War predecessors who stood in the Fulda Gap is still alive, though finding those bodies still in uniform gets harder every day.

On my first trip to Iraq, my brigade commander and battalion CSM were both Vietnam vets.

 

I enlisted in 1979, so many of the senior NCOs and officers were from the Vietnam era.

The MOD unit I was assigned to had the rare "privilege" of having an Army Sergeant Major as our NCIO. He feasted on us Air Force guys. He rode us all the time. I was a morse intercept operator but he said our first job was as an infantryman. The first thing he made me and three other airmen do when we went out into the field was to look through his binoculars at an East German guard tower. He told us (and I paraphrase), "That solider and thousands more like them will not hesitate to kill you if they get the chance. Your first job is to protect the man in uniform next to you and his job is to protect you." As hard-core as that E-9 was, he was fiercely loyal to his men. And the thing is, he did not need to exert his rank to command respect. He had a presence about him. You can tell he had seen combat. Character was tattooed over his face. When I got selected for airborne duty he told me to never let my guard down just because I may be flying above the clouds. He said if I did my job in the air the way I did it on the ground I would still have the back of those men on the line. I had some very good senior NCOs in the Air Force but that Army Sgt. Major is always the first in my mind when I think of the most influential men I ever met while in uniform.

 

We were based out of Ramstein but operated along the West-East German border. The only other similar duty today is along the Korean DMZ. We are relics!

 

I was not in EUCOM. I was in USAFE (United States Air Force Europe). The MOD unit was part of the United States Air Force Electronic Security Command. It was made up of Air Force and Army SIGINT (signals intelligence) specialists; linguists, morse operators, and signals analysts. It was a strange amalgamation. Our commander was an Air Force colonel and our NCOIC was an Army E-9. We reported directly to NSA at Ft. Meade, Maryland.

 

I never pulled duty at the DMZ but I was TDY at Osan Air Base which is not too far from the DMZ.

 

I was not familiar with the EUCOM acronym. I was familiar with USAFE and JOCC.