Word: units
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Wilson was not the only official looking into the matter. Nine days earlier, the State Department's intelligence arm had sent a memo directly to Secretary of State Colin Powell that also disputed the Italian intelligence. Greg Thielmann, then a high-ranking official at State's research unit, told TIME that it was not in Niger's self-interest to sell the Iraqis the destabilizing ore. "A whole lot of things told us that the report was bogus," Thielmann said later. "This wasn't highly contested. There weren't strong advocates on the other side. It was done, shot down...
...tried to call from Iraq nearly every day, even just for two seconds, especially if there had been some incident--one more dead soldier in the news. Chris' Army reserve unit was a civil-affairs team, the ones who hand out medicine and rebuild schools and are supposed to stay a safe distance from actual combat. But somehow Chris had wound up leading convoys back and forth between Kuwait and Baghdad, and Betsy knew that was a much more dangerous mission than normal. On June 30, he phoned Betsy from Iraq to tell her he was heading back to Kuwait...
...father expected it, and he just grew up believing in serving your country." Chris joined the Army in 1971, served as a tank crewman for 3 1/2 years, then moved to the reserves, where he was a tank commander. About 10 years ago, he joined a civil-affairs unit and worked for the rest of the time as a policeman or a summer ranger in national parks like the one in Gettysburg, Pa. He would have loved to work at Gettysburg full-time, says his ranger colleague Tim Sorber. But a National Park Service rule sets the maximum...
...This deployment felt different to both of us," Betsy says. When Chris went to Kosovo, they knew the separation would be hard and that there was still some risk. "But we both knew Iraq was a more hostile environment," she says. It was some comfort to know that a unit like his would be more sheltered: not since Vietnam had a civil-affairs reservist been killed in combat. "We thought he wouldn't be going into Baghdad until things pretty much had been resolved there," says Betsy's sister Candy Barr Heimbach...
...officers who broke the news to Betsy, and a press release from his unit, said he died in a road accident. But the next day Betsy came across a statement from U.S. Central Command: "A U.S. Army 352nd Civil Affairs Command soldier died of wounds received July 1, when his convoy was hit by an improvised explosive device in Baghdad." It didn't mention Chris by name, but Betsy knew he was the only one in his unit to die that day. "I was shaken--I wanted to know what happened because I wanted to know what my husband went...