Austin said that passing a continuing resolution that caps spending at 2024 levels, rather than taking action on the proposed 2025 budget will hurt thousands of defense programs, and damage military recruiting just as it is beginning to recover after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Asking the department to compete with (China), let alone manage conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, while under a lengthy CR, ties our hands behind our back while expecting us to be agile and to accelerate progress,” said Austin in the letter to leaders of the House and Senate appropriations committees.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson has teed up a vote this week on a bill that would keep the federal government funded for six more months. The measure aims to garner support from his more conservative GOP members by also requiring states to obtain proof of citizenship, such as a birth certificate or passport, when registering a person to vote.

Congress needs to approve a stop-gap spending bill before the end of the budget year on Sept. 30 to avoid a government shutdown just a few weeks before voters go to the polls and elect the next president.

Austin said the stop-gap measure would cut defense spending by more than $6 billion compared to the 2025 spending proposal. And it would take money from key new priorities while overfunding programs that no longer need it.

Under a continuing resolution, new projects or programs can’t be started. Austin said that passing the temporary bill would stall more than $4.3 billion in research and development projects and delay 135 new military housing and construction projects totaling nearly $10 billion.

It also would slow progress on a number of key nuclear, ship-building, high-tech drone and other weapons programs. Many of those projects are in an array of congressional districts, and could also have an impact on local residents and jobs.

Since the bill would not fund legally required pay raises for troops and civilians, the department would have to find other cuts to offset them. Those cuts could halt enlistment bonuses, delay training for National Guard and Reserve forces, limit flying hours and other training for active-duty troops and impede the replacement of weapons and other equipment that has been pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine.

Going forward with the continuing resolution, said Austin, will “subject service members and their families to unnecessary stress, empower our adversaries, misalign billions of dollars, damage our readiness, and impede our ability to react to emergent events.”

Noting that there have been 48 continuing resolutions during 14 of the last 15 fiscal years — for a total of nearly 1,800 days — Austin said Congress must break the pattern of inaction because the U.S. military can’t compete with China “with our hands tied behind our back every fiscal year.”

Johnson’s bill is not expected to get support in the Democratic-controlled Senate, if it even makes it that far. But Congress will have to pass some type of temporary measure by Sept. 30 in order to avoid a shutdown.

The future USS New Jersey, a fast-attack submarine, will become a deployable part of the Navy’s force during the ceremony at Naval Weapons Station Earle in New Jersey on Sept. 14, culminating five years of construction that represents a historic shift in how Navy submarines are designed.

The New Jersey is the 23rd Virginia-class submarine, but it is the first of its kind — designed from the keel up with specific modifications for gender integration.

“The submarine community is a fully gender-integrated warfighting force,” said Vice Adm. Robert Gaucher, commander of Submarine Forces Atlantic.

Modifications included obvious ones — more doors and washrooms to create separate sleeping and bathing areas — and some that are more subtle — lowering some overhead valves and making them easier to turn and installing steps in front of the triple-high bunk beds and stacked laundry machines.

The design changes were made to accommodate the growing female force of submariners. In the past five years, the Navy has seen the number of officers and enlisted sailors in the submarine force who are women double and triple, respectively, Gaucher said.

As of August 2024, 730 women were assigned to operational submarines — serving as officers and sailors on 19 nuclear-powered, ballistic-missile and guided-missile submarines, and 19 nuclear-powered attack boats, according to Submarine Forces Atlantic.

The increase follows the 2010 lift of the ban that barred women from serving aboard submarines. A decade later, in 2021, the Navy announced a long-term plan to integrate female officers on 33 submarine crews and female enlisted sailors on 14 submarine crews by 2030.

“To support women serving onboard submarines, the submarine force, starting with [the Pre-Commissioning Unit] New Jersey, is building all future [nuclear-powered attack submarines] and the new Columbia-class, [ballistic-missile submarines] gender-neutral from the keel up,” Gaucher said.

Construction on the New Jersey began in 2019 at HII’s Newport News Shipbuilding division in Virginia. The warship was christened in 2021 and delivered in April to the Navy at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.

Before construction of the New Jersey, the Navy retrofitted existing Ohio-class submarines with extra doors and designated washrooms.

Obesity was the leading cause for disqualification among hopeful military recruit applicants, and the top driver of separations among active-duty troops in 2023, according to the new American Security Project study. The Washington-based think tank that studies modern national security issues found the Pentagon spent some $1.25 billion last year treating military patients for dozens of diseases related to obesity, and another $99 million in lost productivity among hospitalized overweight troops.

“America can no longer afford to ignore this [obesity] crisis,” American Security Project researchers wrote. “The United States armed forces face an unprecedented challenge as obesity prevalence among service members continues to rise. As combat and incidental injuries become less prevalent year-over-year, rates of obesity-related conditions, including diabetes, osteoarthritis, hypertension and steatotic liver disease increasingly meet or exceed civilian trends.”

Researchers suggested the Pentagon take a more proactive approach to preventing obesity, focusing on providing young, enlisted troops with health and nutrition education and access to quality foods. They also suggested the military replace long-held, appearance-based body composition standards with health-based standards driven by medical professionals and classify obesity as a disease in the military health system so troops can be treated medically for the condition.

“Unlike nearly all other diseases affecting service members today, obesity itself is not considered a disability nor disease by the service branches nor the Department of Veterans Affairs, making it difficult to proactively identify and treat,” the report reads. “Without this written classification and its associated protections, service members face bias and discrimination for ‘exceeding weight standards,’ becoming ineligible for promotion, educational privileges, deployment or disability compensation.”

Last year, the American Security Project found nearly seven in 10 active-duty troops were overweight or obese, according to their body mass index, including some 21% of active-duty troops qualified as obese, a rate that more than doubled in the past decade. Body mass index, or BMI, is a long-used but controversial method of assessing a person’s body classification by height and weight. A person between 25 and 30 on the BMI is considered clinically overweight and more than 30 is considered obese, according to the National Institutes of Health.

The researchers found the weight problem within the military was at least two-pronged because of rising obesity rates among the civilian population from which the military needs to recruit, and the loosening of military fitness standards to ensure the services have enough troops in their ranks amid recent enlistment struggles. The Pentagon, the researchers found, has lowered fitness standards to keep overweight troops in the ranks and increased the use of body composition waivers to bring overweight recruits into the military.

The military services have taken steps in recent years to counter obesity. The Army and Navy introduced fitness courses to engage potential recruits early and get them into shape to qualify for service. The Marines, meanwhile, began using more accurate biometric scanning machines last year to assess body fat.

But the American Security Project concluded those measures were not enough to mitigate the threat of increasing weight problems in the force, which were exacerbated during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, which forced many troops away from daily exercise during lockdowns. Obesity rates have not improved since the lockdowns ended, according to the researchers.

They charge reversing military policies that stigmatize obesity — such as tape measure tests — and focusing instead on providing treatment for troops susceptible to obesity or diagnosed with obesity would improve military readiness and save the services money — up to $1 billion each year, according to the study.

“These recommendations aren’t just well-justified by the existing research, they are highly cost-effective,” the researchers concluded. “Upfront investments in clinical care saves tens of thousands of dollars per patient in the long run, even if those patients remain overweight.”

___

(c)2024 the Stars and Stripes

Visit the Stars and Stripes at www.stripes.com

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The source of a letter — written in 1945 by a serviceman stationed in Hampton Roads and found last month in Florida — has been identified.

Mike Meyer, 65, lives in Safety Harbor, Florida, and said he put the letter in the bottle and sent it out to sea earlier this year.

Meyer’s father was born in 1929 and was too young to join the military until the end of World War II but often wrote and received letters from older friends who’d left their Illinois hometown to enlist. One buddy, Jim Peters, wrote to Meyer’s father, Leroy, on March 4, 1945. The message was jotted in cursive underneath the letterhead “United States Navy, Amphibious Training Base, Little Creek, Virginia.”

That letter and bottle were found on the side of a Safety Harbor road last month by Suzanne Flament-Smith amid storm debris after Hurricane Debby. It had been washed back ashore not far from where it was let go.

The bottle also contained some sand, a bullet casing and a circular hunk of metal that Flament-Smith described as “about the size of a Whopper candy.” She quickly took to social media to share her discovery and a question: Where had it come from?

The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, The New York Times, The Washington Post and dozens of other news outlets wrote or carried stories about the curiosity.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” Meyer told The Pilot about the fuss over his dad’s old letter.

“I guess the first thing is …” he said, and then he unraveled the mystery. Leroy Meyer stored many of his wartime correspondences in a box that was passed down to his children after he died in 2001. The letters were stored at his daughter’s home until Mike got them several years ago.

Mike Meyer read and reread his father’s letters. Some had been sent from soldiers overseas. One was from a girlfriend working in a factory that made Lockheed P-38 Lightning airplanes. He came to consider them historical documents and a friend’s recent retirement sparked an idea of how to share them with the world.

“She had sold her business and was throwing away some rare inventory,” he said. “She had all these Message-in-a-Bottle kits.”

Keeping his 10 favorites, he put 40 of his dad’s letters into the kits — one letter per bottle — and this spring began launching them, a few at a time, several times a week, watching through a pair of binoculars as they floated out on the tide.

“I usually put something shiny in there so they were more likely to be seen.”

He put a shell casing and a ball bearing in a bottle on April 16 along with the March 4, 1945 letter.

“I just turned it loose.”

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

The United States’ longest war is over. But not for everyone.

Outside of San Francisco, surgeon Doug Chin has helped provide medical assistance to people in Afghanistan via video calls. He has helped Afghan families with their day-to-day living expenses. Yet he remains haunted by the people he could not save.

In Long Beach, California, Special Forces veteran Thomas Kasza has put aside medical school to help Afghans who used to search for land mines escape to America. That can mean testifying to Congress, writing newsletters and asking for donations.

In rural Virginia, Army veteran Mariah Smith housed an Afghan family of four that she’d never met who had fled Kabul and needed a place to stay as they navigated their new life in America.

Smith, Kasza and Chin have counterparts scattered across the country — likeminded people they may never have heard of.

The war in Afghanistan officially ended in August 2021 when the last U.S. plane departed the country’s capital city. What remains is a dedicated array of Americans — often working in isolation, or in small grassroots networks — who became committed to helping the Afghan allies the United States left behind. For them, the war didn’t end that day.

In the three years since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, hundreds of people around the country — current and former military members, diplomats, intelligence officers, civilians from all walks of life — have struggled in obscurity to help the Afghans left behind.

They have assisted Afghans struggling through State Department bureaucracy fill out form after form. They have sent food and rent money to families. They have fielded WhatsApp or Signal messages at all hours from Afghans pleading for help. They have welcomed those who have made it out of Afghanistan into their homes as they build new lives.

For Americans involved in this ad hoc effort, the war has reverberated through their lives, weighed on their relationships, caused veterans to question their military service and in many cases left a scar as ragged as any caused by bullet or bomb.

Most are tired. Many are angry. They grapple with what it means for their nation that they, ordinary Americans moved by compassion and gratitude and by shame at what they consider their government’s abandonment of countless Afghan allies, were the ones left to get those Afghans to safety.

And they struggle with how much more they have left to give.

The network was born out of chaos

The American mission in Afghanistan started with the goal of eradicating al-Qaida and avenging the group’s Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the mission morphed and grew over two decades. Every president inherited an evolving version of a war that no commander-in-chief wanted to lose — but that none could figure out how to win.

By the time President Joe Biden decided to pull the U.S. military from Afghanistan by Aug. 31, 2021, the American mission there was riddled with failures. But by early August the Taliban had toppled key cities and was closing in on the capital. With the Afghan army largely collapsed, the Taliban rolled into Kabul and assumed control on Aug. 15. The Biden administration scrambled to evacuate staff, American citizens and at-risk Afghans.

One Biden administration official recently described the chaos of those three weeks to The Associated Press, saying that it felt like nobody in the U.S. government was able to steer the ship. With the Taliban in control of the capital, tens of thousands of Afghans crowded the airport trying to get on one of the planes out.

That is when this informal network was born.

Past and current members of the U.S. military, the State Department and U.S. intelligence services were all being besieged with messages begging for help from Afghans they’d worked with. Americans horrified by what they were seeing and reading on the news reached out as well, determined to help.

Veterans who’d served multiple tours in Afghanistan and civilians who’d never set foot there all spent sleepless weeks working their telephones, fighting to get out every Afghan they could and to help those still trapped.

The work to get visas is difficult

One of those civilians was Doug Chin. A plastic surgeon in Oakland California, he was already familiar with Afghanistan, although he’d never been there. A few years before the Taliban takeover, he’d become involved with the then Herat-based Afghan Girls Robotics Team. So impressed was he with their mission that he’d joined their board and sometimes traveled to their international events.

Then, in August 2021, the Taliban entered Herat. Eventually came the scenes out of Kabul airport: mothers hoisting children over barbed wire, men falling to their deaths as they clung to the bottom of departing planes. Chin, working contacts, worked to help the team, their extended families, staff and others get on flight manifests, navigate checkpoints and eventually escape Kabul.

The work was so intense that he shut down his business for three months to focus on helping Afghans. For a time, he was supporting dozens of people in Afghanistan.

Now, three years later, the work is shifting. It’s a matter of trying to get visas for Afghans so they can escape — an educational visa to study in Europe, for example.

He advocates for human rights activists in Afghanistan and also helps provide medical services remotely to people in there. Once or twice a week he gets requests via the secure messaging app Signal to help someone in Afghanistan. Chin will either give advice directly or help them get in touch with doctors in Afghanistan that can help.

Some memories still move him to tears. In one case, in August 2021, a busload of people he’d helped evacuate was heading to the Kabul airport. One woman wasn’t on the passenger manifest. U.S. officials coordinating the evacuations told him that the Taliban controlling access to the airport might turn the entire bus around because of this one passenger. Chin had to order her off the bus. She later escaped Afghanistan, but it remains painful for him.

“The only thing I can think of,” he says, “is the people that I haven’t helped.”

Many Afghans are still waiting

In those initial months, there was a frantic intensity to the efforts to get Afghans into the Kabul airport and onto the American military planes. Volunteers pushed U.S. contacts in Kabul to let Afghans into the airport, coordinated to get them onto the flight lists, lobbied any member of Congress or government official they could find and helped Afghans in Kabul find safe places to go. Even leaders of the U.S. administration and military resorted to the volunteer groups and journalists to get out individual Afghan friends or ex-colleagues.

By the time the last plane lifted off on Aug. 30, 2021, about 76,000 Afghans had been flown out of the country and eventually to the U.S. Another 84,000 have come since the fall of Kabul – each a victory for the Americans helping them over the Taliban and over a tortuous U.S. immigration process.

But more are still waiting. There are about 135,000 applicants to the special immigrant visa program and another 28,000 waiting on other refugee programs for Afghans connected to the U.S. mission. Those numbers don’t include family members, meaning potentially hundreds of thousands more Afghans are waiting in limbo and in danger in Afghanistan.

In 2009, Congress passed legislation creating a special immigrant visa program to help Afghans and Iraqis who assisted the U.S. government emigrate to the United States. The idea was that they’d risked their lives to help America’s war effort, and in return they deserved a new life and protection in America.

But ever since its inception, the SIV program has been dogged by complaints that it has moved too slowly, burdening applicants with too much paperwork and ultimately putting America’s wartime allies in danger as they waited for decisions.

Under the Biden administration, the State Department has taken steps to streamline the process and has boosted the number of special immigrant visas issued each month to Afghans. The department says that in fiscal year 2023, it issued more SIVs for Afghans in a single year than ever before — more than 18,000 — and is on track to surpass that figure this year. State has also used what it’s learned to streamline processing of SIV applicants to increase the number of refugees it is admitting to the United States from around the world.

The Biden administration official said most people remember only the chaos of those last two weeks of August and have no idea about the work that has been done in the three years since. But for those still waiting to come, they do so under constant threat and stress.

No One Left Behind, an organization helping Afghans who used to work for the U.S. government get out of Afghanistan, has documented 242 case of reprisal killings with at least 101 who had applied or were clearly SIV-eligible.

Some are trying to push the government along

Faraidoon “Fred” Abdullah is one of the volunteers often referred to as caseworkers. He has helped hundreds of Afghans fill out immigration and visa forms or hunt down letters of recommendation from former employers.

“They’re eligible. They have the documentation, but (the) Department of State is too slow,” Abdullah says.

His journey to this work started a little differently. The 37-year-old Afghanistan native began to work with the U.S. military as a translator during the war. He left his home country in 2016 through the same program he’s trying to help people through now. A year later, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.

“I lost many American friends while they served my country, while they were helping Afghan people,” Abdullah says. “So it was always like a dream for me to wear the uniform officially as a part of the United States military to pay them back with my service, with my time.”

He describes the work he has done over the last several years — as one of the few people who speaks the language and understands Afghan culture — as similar to that of a social worker. The calls come at random and varying hours of the night and day, he says.

“It’s like PTSD, and they might just snap at you like for no reason,” Abdullah says about the people he’s tried to help. “And not everybody has the patience and tolerance and the ability to deal with that.”

He was on active duty when the United States decided to withdraw. He had left his mom, siblings and other relatives in Afghanistan, thinking that the democracy that had been slowly built over the years would endure. It didn’t.

Over the last few years, Abdullah has been able to relocate a few family members out of Afghanistan. But more than a dozen still remain stuck in a process run by the departments of State and Defense. Now he worries that attention has faded from Afghanistan as other conflicts take precedence. The same urgency to donate, volunteer or sustain Afghans as their status remains in limbo is no longer there.

“Afghanistan is, right now, not an important issue — not a hot potato anymore,” Abdullah says. “That focus has shifted to Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Haiti. And then we are kind of like, you know, nowhere.”

The Special Forces notion of ‘by, with and through’ is important

To understand what has taken place since the last U.S. flight left Afghanistan, former military members will point you to the Special Forces operational approach titled, “by, with and through.”

The term effectively means that nothing the United States does on the ground in a partner state is done without allies. In the case of Afghanistan, that’s the Afghans who — at great risk to themselves — turned against the Taliban to work with the Americans.

So when Kabul fell, the obligation to their Afghan allies left behind was equal to the responsibility to their own fellow service members. Just as they would never leave another service member behind, so too with the Afghans they worked with.

It is a commitment Thomas Kasza knows all too well.

He spent 13 years active duty in the U.S. military, 10 as part of U.S. Army Special Forces, with tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. As he prepared to leave active duty in August 2021, Kasza was planning to go to medical school. Then came the evacuation.

Like many U.S. military veterans, Kasza started helping Afghans he knew who were still in Afghanistan. At first, he was determined to limit his involvement.

Today, the notion of medical school has been abandoned. He’s the executive director of an organization called the 1208 Foundation. The group helps Afghans who worked with the Special Forces to detect explosives to come to America. Kasza and another Special Forces member and six Afghans do the work.

The foundation does things like pay for housing for the Afghans when they travel to another country for their visa interviews or paying for the required medical exams. They also help Afghans still in Afghanistan where they’re hunted by the Taliban. In 2023 they helped 25 Afghan families get out of Afghanistan. Each is a hard-fought victory and a new life. But they still have about another 170 cases in their roster, representing more than 900 people when family members are included.

To focus on the mission — getting those Afghan team members to safety — he limits the conversations he has with them. “You have to maintain a separation for your own sanity,” he says.

As the third anniversary of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan arrives, Kasza is preparing to step back from the executive director role at the organization he helped found although he’ll still be involved in the organization. Everything that’s happened over the last three years still weighs on him.

“I can’t do what our government did and look the other way,” he says.

Scott Mann, a retired Green Beret who spent several deployments training Afghan special forces, describes the work of the past few years as “being on the world’s longest 911 call” and unable to hang up. “It is like one of the most taboo things in the world to leave a partner on the battlefield in any way,” he says.

Scott adds that many veterans, like himself, are only alive now “because on at least two occasions Afghan partners prevented” them from getting killed.

“And now those very people are asking me to help their father or their mother who were on the run,” he says. “How do you hang up the phone on something like that?”

They’re trying to fix ‘moral injury’

Some of the volunteers spoke of tapping their own retirement accounts, or their children’s college funds, to keep stranded Afghan allies housed and fed, sometimes for years. Marriages reached breaking points over the time that volunteers were putting into the effort. Spouses and children warned their loved ones that they had to cut back.

One veteran who worked at the heart of the logistics network by which volunteers got grocery and rent money to Afghan allies talked of the loneliness of the work, where once he’d had fellow troops with him in tough times. As the effort went on, he upped his antidepressants. Then did it again. And again.

“Moral injury” is a relatively new term that is often referred to in the discussion about how many volunteers, especially military veterans, feel about the aftermath of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan and the treatment of allies. It refers to the damage done to one’s conscience by the things they’ve had to do or witnessed or failed to prevent — things that violate their own values. In this case, they feel betrayed by their country because they feel it has failed to protect Afghan allies.

It is a concept that Kate Kovarovic feels passionate about.

She is not a veteran, nor does she come from a military family. But she became involved in the effort after a friend reached out to her in 2021 to ask for her social media expertise. From there Kate got more and more involved until she became the director of resilience programming for #AfghanEvac, a coalition of organizations dedicated to helping Afghans trying to leave Afghanistan. She held that position for over a year. She describes it as the hardest job of her life.

During the evacuation and its aftermath, volunteers were focused on helping Afghans flee or find safe houses. But a few months later volunteers started realizing that they needed support as well, she says.

The ease of communication meant volunteers were always getting bombarded with pleas for help.

Kovarovic says they tried a little bit of everything to help the volunteers. She held a series of fireside chats where she’d talk to mental health professionals. They created a resource page on #AfghanEvac’s website with mental health resources. And she helped create a Resilience Duty Officer support program where volunteers needing someone to talk to could call or text a 24-hour hotline. She describes that program as “catastrophically successful.”

The volunteers weren’t just calling to vent a little. Kovarovic says the calls were graphic. Desperate.

“I personally fielded over 50 suicide calls from people,” she recalls. “You were hearing a lot of the trauma.”

She lost weight, wasn’t sleeping and developed an eye twitch that made it difficult to see. Loved ones asked her to stop. In 2023, she took a break. Home from a two-week vacation, she landed at the airport and her eye twitch immediately returned. She sat down and texted colleagues that it was time for her to stop.

“I wept. I have never felt such a heavy sense of guilt. I felt like I hadn’t done enough and that I had failed people by abandoning them,” she says.

She now hosts a podcast called “Shoulder to Shoulder: Untold Stories From a Forgotten War” with a retired Air Force veteran that she met during the evacuation. They talk to guests like a Gold Star mother and an Afghan interpreter who lost his legs in a bomb blast.

She wants people outside the community to know that the work of helping Afghans during the withdrawal and all that has happened since has been its own front line in the war on terror.

“What I hope that people will understand one day is that these are lifelong conditions,” she says. “So even people who leave the volunteer work, even if you never speak to another Afghan again, this is going to sit with you for the rest of your life.”

A lot of work remains

Everyone in the movement, spread out across time zones, has varying views of where this effort goes from here. Many want Congress to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would provide a permanent emigration pathway for Afghans. Others would like support for volunteers’ mental health concerns. Many just want accountability.

None of the four presidents who oversaw the war in Afghanistan has taken public responsibility for the chaos and destruction that followed America’s withdrawal. Biden, in charge when U.S. troops left, has come under the most criticism.

The Biden administration official, who spoke to AP on the condition of anonymity, said that the unwillingness by the U.S. government to admit its mistakes in regards to Afghanistan is perpetuating the moral injury felt by those who stepped up.

In the meantime, the work goes on — getting Afghans to safety and helping them once they’re here.

In 2022, at Dulles International Airport, Army veteran Mariah Smith got to experience that moment. Smith spent three tours in Afghanistan and one in Iraq. With retirement from the military nearing in 2020, she joined the board of No One Left Behind. Then came the U.S. withdrawal.

One of the Afghans the group was helping was a woman named Latifa who had worked for the U.S. government. With the Taliban encircling and constant concerns over bombings, Latifa and her family didn’t want to risk taking the young children to the airport.

She was eventually able to get a visa to what is likely one of the least used Afghan immigration routes: Iceland. From there, No One Left Behind helped her process her special immigrant visa. That’s how Smith and the woman started talking.

They discussed where the woman and her family were going to live. Mariah lives in Stephens City on a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley countryside. She also owns a home in town that she usually rents out but was empty at the time. She offered it to Latifa and her family.

Mariah was amazed at the response by the town of roughly 2,000 people where the Afghan family lived. Latifa, her husband and two kids came with the luggage they could carry, but Mariah said the mayor, police chief, town clerk, town manager and others all pitched in with furniture, toys and household items: “People really, really tried hard. And that was wonderful to see too.” The Afghan family stayed for over a year before moving to Dallas.

Why did she make that offer of a place to stay? Smith says it was a way to help a woman, her family, her children who’d had everything taken from them in their home country — helping them find a safe place, showing them that it was possible to start over here. Filling a gap. Helping.

“It felt like being a part of, I guess, the fabric of America.”

Associated Press journalist Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — An Army private who fled to North Korea just over a year ago will plead guilty to desertion and four other charges and take responsibility for his conduct, his lawyer said Monday.

Travis King’s attorney, Franklin D. Rosenblatt, told The Associated Press that King intends to admit guilt to a total of five military offenses, including desertion and assaulting an officer. Nine other offenses, including possession of sexual images of a child, will be withdrawn and dismissed under the terms of the deal.

King will be given an opportunity at a Sept. 20 hearing at Fort Bliss, Texas, to discuss his actions and explain what he did.

“He wants to take responsibility for the things that he did,” Rosenblatt said.

In a separate statement, he added, “Travis is grateful to his friends and family who have supported him, and to all outside his circle who did not pre-judge his case based on the initial allegations.”

He declined to comment on a possible sentence that his client might face. Desertion is a serious charge and can result in imprisonment.

The AP reported last month that the two sides were in plea talks.

King bolted across the heavily fortified border from South Korea in July 2023, and became the first American detained in North Korea in nearly five years.

His run into North Korea came soon after he was released from a South Korean prison where he had served nearly two months on assault charges.

About a week after his release from the prison, military officers took him to the airport so he could return to Fort Bliss to face disciplinary action. He was escorted as far as customs, but instead of getting on the plane, he joined a civilian tour of the Korean border village of Panmunjom. He then ran across the border, which is lined with guards and often crowded with tourists.

He was detained by North Korea, but after about two months, Pyongyang abruptly announced that it would expel him. On Sept. 28, he was flown to back to Texas, and has been in custody there.

The U.S. military in October filed a series of charges against King under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, including desertion, as well as kicking and punching other officers, unlawfully possessing alcohol, making a false statement and possessing a video of a child engaged in sexual activity. Those allegations date back to July 10, the same day he was released from the prison.

Earlier this month, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered additional combat aircraft and missile-shooting warships to the region.

Two aircraft carriers — the USS Theodore Roosevelt and the USS Abraham Lincoln — and their accompanying warships and attack planes are now in or near the Gulf of Oman. Austin also made public his order to send the attack submarine USS Georgia to the region, an unusual move as the Pentagon seldom talks about the movements of its submarine fleet. The Georgia can fire cruise missiles and carry teams of Navy SEAL commandos.

The orders came in response to threats from Iran and its proxies in the Gaza Strip, Lebanon and Yemen to attack Israel to avenge the assassination of a top Hamas leader, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran, Iran, on July 31.

While the U.S. has said these moves are to help defend Israel and avert a wider regional war, a senior U.S. official said Saturday night that the U.S. military was better positioned to address a threat from Iran, and that the Israeli military would shoulder the bulk of any defense from attacks carried out by Hezbollah across the border in Lebanon.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Gregg became the first living person in modern American history to have a military installation named for him, when Fort Lee became Fort Gregg-Adams on April 27, 2023, the Army said. The installation just outside Petersburg, the home of the Army’s logistics training, was renamed for Gregg and another Black officer, Lt. Col. Charity Adams, as part of a Congress-led effort to strip the service of honors for Confederate soldiers, including former namesake Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Gregg attended the renaming ceremony last year at the post and was known to frequent the installation since the name change, according to the Army news release announcing his death. He was last at Fort Gregg-Adams on July 31 for a change-of-command ceremony.

“Lt. Gen. Gregg will continue to inspire all who knew him and those who serve at Fort Gregg-Adams now and in the futurem,” Maj. Gen. Michelle Donahue, the installation’s top commander, said in a statement. “His dedication and leadership will never be forgotten. Our deepest condolences to his family and loved ones during this difficult time.”

Gregg broke several glass ceilings for Black soldiers. In 1972, he became the service’s first Black brigadier general in its quartermaster corps. Five years later, he became the highest-ranking Black soldier — at that time — with his promotion to lieutenant general. In 1981, he retired as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for logistics, capping a 35-year career.

Gregg grew up in South Carolina on a 100-acre farm that grew cotton and tobacco, according to an Army profile.

Inspired by the Black soldiers who fought in World War II, Gregg enlisted in the Army in 1946 and was quickly deployed to occupied, post-war Germany to support supply operations, according to this service biography. In 1949, one year after President Harry S. Truman ordered the military desegregated, Gregg entered officer candidate school.

His first assignment as an officer, in 1950, was at Camp Lee, which would become Fort Lee later that year.

His career took him to Japan, several assignments in Germany and jobs at the Pentagon, including as the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s logistics director. In 1966, Gregg commanded the 96th Quartermaster Direct Support Battalion in Vietnam — one of the Army’s largest battalions in the country boasting some 3,600 troops, according to service records.

Gregg said his command experience in Vietnam was “the most significant point” in his storied career.

“It was four-times the normal battalion size, and I’ll tell you, those young people worked their fannies off to build a logistical base and provide logistical support to our forces in Vietnam,” Gregg said in a 2023 Army release. “I was so proud of them.”

Last year, as the Army settled on renaming Fort Lee to Fort Gregg-Adams, Gregg said he was supportive of the effort to strip Fort Lee and eight other southern Army posts of the names of Confederate generals, many of whom were slave owners. However, he said, he was surprised his name would be considered to replace Lee’s.

“I was very honored that they felt I was worthy but, you know, you don’t take it too seriously,” Gregg said at the ceremony to rename the post. “I was aware that there were a number of really outstanding people up for consideration. When the decision was made that the post would be redesignated Gregg-Adams, I was just overwhelmed.”

The so-called Naming Commission, which led efforts to strip honors for former Confederates from the U.S. military, wrote Gregg proved an officer of “great skill, leading by example and embarking on a career of excellence” in announcing its decision to name the base for him and Adams.

“Though Gregg and Adams served on different missions and in different conflicts, consistent themes of leadership, dedication, and problem solving united their service,” the commission wrote in its August 2022 final report to Congress. “Moreover, in overcoming the sustainment obstacles caused by war, they also helped overcome the social obstacles caused by segregation. Their service simultaneously supported mission success and societal progress.”

“A lot of allied and partner disruptions” of the ISIS-K network have reduced its “capability to conduct such an attack,” Christopher Maier, assistant secretary for special operations and low intensity conflict, said in a brief interview after a breakfast meeting with reporters Friday.

President Joe Biden promised the day of the attack outside Hamid Karzai International Airport that “we will not forgive, we will not forget, we will hunt you down and make you pay.” Maier said “we are in the process of doing that,” and “we have made significant dents in this network that conducted the Abbey Gate attack.”

The attack three years ago next Monday marked a devastating low point in an operation that critics have lambasted as chaotic even as 124,000 Afghans were evacuated amid the U.S. exit from Afghanistan and the Taliban takeover of the country.

Republicans have seized on the attack to blast Biden’s foreign policy. During his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in July, former President Donald Trump said U.S. standing in the world “began to unravel with the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the worst humiliation in the history of our country.”

Trump forged a February 2020 deal with the Taliban, but not the Afghan government, that set an initial timetable for U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, which Biden modified. Trump and the Republican Party blame Biden — and now Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee to succeed him — for how the withdrawal was carried out.

During the breakfast with reporters, Maier said “we continue to assess that Abbey Gate” was the work of “more than one individual” who benefited from the ISIS-K infrastructure. Since then, he said, the U.S. and partners “have had clear cases where we’ve been able to disrupt the network that was associated with Abbey Gate.”

“One of the things we have been able to benefit from is Central Asian countries more attuned from the threat from Afghanistan,” he said. “Some of the recent plots that have been foiled point to direct support from some of these partners,” he said, without naming the countries involved.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee plans to release its review of the withdrawal from Afghanistan early next month.

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FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. (AP) — A Florida sheriff’s deputy was charged with manslaughter with a firearm, launching a rarely seen criminal case against a Florida law officer after a Black U.S. Air Force senior airman was killed after answering his apartment door while holding a gun pointed toward the ground.

Former Okaloosa County deputy Eddie Duran, 38, was charged in the May 3 shooting death of 23-year-old Roger Fortson, Assistant State Attorney Greg Marcille said. The charge is a first-degree felony punishable by up to 30 years in prison.

Marcille said a warrant has been issued for Duran’s arrest but he was not in custody as Friday afternoon.

“Let this be a reminder to law enforcement officers everywhere that they swore a solemn oath to protect and defend, and their actions have consequences, especially when it results in the loss of life,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represents the airman’s family, said Friday.

Sabu Williams, president of the local branch of the NAACP, told The Associated Press that “I think this is the best that we could have hoped for in this particular case.”

Duran listed himself as Hispanic on his voter registration, and the charging documents released Friday also identify him that way.

Authorities say Duran had been directed to Fortson’s Fort Walton Beach apartment in response to a domestic disturbance report that turned out to be false.

After repeated knocking, Fortson opened the door while holding his handgun at his side, pointed down. Authorities say that Duran shot him multiple times; only then did he tell Fortson to drop the gun.

On Friday, candles and framed photos of Fortson in uniform graced the doorway of the apartment where he was killed.

Okaloosa Sheriff Eric Aden fired Duran on May 31 after an internal investigation concluded his life was not in danger when he opened fire.

Duran’s attorney, John Whitaker, did not immediately respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

It is highly unusual for Florida law enforcement officers to be charged for an on-duty killing — it has only happened four times in the last 35 years before Friday. Even then, only one of those officers has been convicted.

Four Miami-Dade officers were recently indicted on manslaughter charges in connection with a shootout with two robbers who hijacked a UPS truck. The shootout left the UPS driver and a passerby dead along with the hijackers.

Three police officers in the Okaloosa County town of Crestview are awaiting trial on manslaughter charges for the 2021 death of a man who reportedly died after being jolted with a stun gun. Those officers have pleaded not guilty.

A former Palm Beach Gardens officer is serving a 25-year prison sentence for manslaughter and attempted murder for a 2015 shooting. The officer was undercover and in plain clothes when he fatally shot a Black man whose SUV had broken down on an interstate off-ramp. The man had feared he was being robbed, pulled out his licensed handgun and tried to flee before he was shot.

A Broward sheriff’s deputy was charged with manslaughter for the 2014 fatal shooting of a Black man who was carrying an air rifle he had just purchased. A judge later threw out that charge.

The U.S. Supreme Court has given law enforcement officers “qualified immunity” for their on-duty actions, making it difficult to charge and convict them for questionable shootings. The court says that officers can only be convicted if the evidence shows that their conduct was illegal and they should have known they were violating “clearly established” law.

Duran began his law enforcement career as a military police officer in the Army. He was hired by an Oklahoma police department in 2015 after his military discharge. He joined the Okaloosa County sheriff’s office in 2019, but resigned two years later and then rejoined the sheriff’s office in 2023.

Okaloosa personnel records show he was reprimanded in 2021 for not completing his assignment to confirm the addresses of three registered sex offenders by visiting their homes. Then assigned to a high school as its on-campus deputy, he was also disciplined that year for leaving the school before the final bell and the students’ departure. Florida law requires that an armed guard be on campus when class is in session.

In a statement Friday, the sheriff’s office said it stands by its decision to terminate Duran and has been “fully accountable and transparent” throughout the case.

The apartment complex where Fortson lived is about 8 miles (13 kilometers) from Hurlburt Field, where Fortson was assigned to the 4th Special Operations Squadron as a special missions aviator serving on an AC-130J Ghostrider gunship.

Duran went to the apartment complex on May 3 after getting the domestic disturbance call. Duran met an apartment manager who directed him to Fortson’s fourth-floor unit, telling him there had been frequent arguments, the deputy’s body camera video shows.

But Fortson, who had no criminal record, lived alone and had no guests that afternoon. He was on a video call with his girlfriend, who told investigators they had not been arguing. She said Fortson was playing a video game.

Also, 911 records show deputies had never been called to Fortson’s apartment previously but they had been called to a nearby unit 10 times in the previous eight months, including once for a domestic disturbance.

When Duran arrived outside Fortson’s door, he stood silently for 20 seconds and listened, but no voices inside are recorded on Duran’s body camera video.

He then pounded on the door, but didn’t identify himself. He then moved to the side of the door, about 5 feet away (1.5 meters). He told investigators he feared that the person inside might fire through the door or open the door and push him over the rail and to the ground about 40 feet (12 meters) below.

He waited 15 seconds before pounding on the door again. This time he yelled, “Sheriff’s office — open the door!” He again moved to the side. A muffled voice can be heard on the video — Duran said he heard someone cursing at the police.

Less then 10 seconds later, Duran moved back in front of the door and pounded again, announcing himself once more.

Fortson’s girlfriend told investigators that the airman asked who was there but did not get a response. She said Fortson told her he was not going to answer the door because no one comes to his apartment. She said neither of them heard the deputy yell that he was with the sheriff’s office.

After the third knock, she said Fortson told her, “I’m gonna go grab my gun because I don’t know who that is.”

When Fortson opened the door holding his gun, Duran said “Step back,” and then two seconds later began firing. Fortson fell backward onto the floor.

Only then did the deputy yell, “Drop the gun!”

Fortson replied, “It’s over there.”

The deputy called for paramedics, but Fortson died a short time later at the hospital.

___

Anderson reported from St. Petersburg, Florida; Martin reported from Atlanta. Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, contributed to this story.