Fort Campbell Soldier Receives Distinguished Service Cross

By Megan Locke Simpson

Fort Campbell Courier

FORT CAMPBELL, Ky.  – A 101st Airborne Division soldier received the nation’s second-highest military honor in a ceremony today at McAuliffe Hall here.

Army Sgt. Felipe Pereira is the first “Screaming Eagle” to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross since the Vietnam War. Pereira is a squad leader assigned to Company A, 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment. He earned the recognition for what the official citation calls “distinguished service and heroism” during a firefight in Kandahar, Afghanistan, Nov. 1, 2010.

“It’s a great honor to represent the division,” Pereira said. “It’s real nice to be able to represent the 101st and show … the caliber of soldiers that we actually have here.”

The 28-year-old Brazilian immigrant was joined by his wife, mother and father, as well as other family members during the presentation from Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond T. Odierno at division headquarters.

“I’ve always had this kind of fighting thing in me,” Pereira said, explaining why he joined the Army. “I wanted to see combat, I really did.”

Odierno recognized Pereira for his “extraordinary actions in the face of adversity.”

“We are all here because your actions distinguish you as a hero,” Odierno said to Pereira. “The reality is there are people alive today because of those actions.

“In that defining moment,” the general added, “Sergeant Pereira’s actions will be forever etched in our nation’s history. … His actions were in keeping with the highest ideals of the warrior ethos. Ignoring his own safety, forgetting his own pain, he defied the blizzard of gunfire blazing through the smoke, the bullets and the chaos to help his fellow soldiers in their time of need.”

Pereira joined the Army in March 2009 and deployed to Afghanistan’s Zhari district in May 2010. Six months later, a roadside bomb detonated during a dismounted patrol, killing two soldiers in Pereira’s squad. According to the citation, Pereira suffered shrapnel wounds, and his lung began to collapse.

With an ambush from the enemy under way, “with little regard for his own safety or care” Pereira drove an all-terrain vehicle into enemy fire to help evacuate wounded soldiers. After moving the first set of casualties, Pereira went back into the line of fire once more to help others.

Pereira, who held the rank of  specialist at the time, “is credited with saving the lives of two of his fellow soldiers, while risking his own [on] multiple occasions. Only after all of the wounded soldiers had been evacuated and were receiving medical care did he accept treatment himself,” according to the citation.

“Everything kind of started like just a regular patrol … until pretty much the very end of it, when everything just went haywire,” Pereira recalled.

Even while being recognized for his heroic efforts during his first deployment, Pereira said he feels more than ever that he was only doing what he signed up to do.

“To be honest with you, it just felt like a normal day – doing my job,” he said. “Obviously, yes, it was a hectic situation, it was extreme situation and everything, but it doesn’t feel any different than something we should have done. I keep saying had I not done it, somebody else probably would have, and the job would have gotten done the same way.”

If anyone was a hero that day, Pereira said, the true honor goes to the two soldiers – Pfc. Andrew N. Meari and Spc. Jonathan M. Curtis – who lost their lives.

“Every time I have the opportunity, I always say, ‘Remember those that gave the ultimate sacrifice,’” he said. “I still get to come back and enjoy barbecues with my family and … their love and everything. Those guys, they really gave it all. Those are truly the heroes. Just remember those guys. I think even on a happy occasion like this, I think we need to celebrate their life and their sacrifice.”

Pereira’s experiences not only serve as an example to his fellow soldiers, but also provide guidance for even the small battles of everyday life.

“If you actually stop and think, that’s when you start panicking because you don’t know what to do,” he said. “The key is to keep moving, and hope the decisions you’re making are the best decisions that can be made.”

Pereira is the 165th 101st Airborne Division soldier to receive the Distinguished Service Cross.

USDA Tennessee Office Welcomes Wounded Warriors

Kevin Hart, NRCS District Conservationist, Clarksville, Tennessee

Volunteers for U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) come from all walks of life. In Tennessee, we’ve been lucky enough to have U.S. Army soldiers, who were injured while serving our nation, volunteer at the Clarksville NRCS Field Office.

Clarksville is only eight miles from Fort Campbell, Ky., a large Army base which straddles the Kentucky and Tennessee border. Fort Campbell is the home of the 101st Airborne Division, Special Forces units, a combat support hospital and sizeable medical facilities.

Fort Campbell soldiers have been seeing a lot of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means there are many combat-wounded needing treatment and time to heal.

Earth Team, NRCS’ volunteer workforce, seems to be a great fit for many of these vets. It gives them an opportunity to be productive and contribute during their recovery. We can accommodate most physical limitations they might have, and they have the flexibility to go to medical appointments when needed. And hopefully with time many of them are able to return to their regular military jobs.

Shontel Lawrence, Ft. Campbell Army Wounded Warrior Advocate, works with me and my staff to place recovering soldiers as Earth Team volunteers. We tailor our jobs to the participants’ preferences and abilities. Soldiers get to learn new skills, try out being conservationists and gain a civilian work reference.

The leadership skills and self-reliance these soldiers possess ensures that they are self-starters.  Many are technologically savvy and able to immediately contribute with computer-oriented tasks, due to the skills they gained in the military. Others assist with field work, including surveying and inspecting conservation practices, that occurs during the planning and implementation of putting conservation on the ground.

One young man told me that his time spent volunteering was as beneficial to his emotional healing as it was to his physical healing. And at NRCS, we are very grateful for these soldiers’ help.

I am very proud of the fact that when these soldiers leave us and return to active duty or civilian life, they leave with healed bodies and new skills, knowing they have helped us help the land.

In fiscal year 2011, more than 22,000 Earth Team volunteers donated 435,653 hours of service to NRCS estimated to be worth $9.3 million. Since Earth Team was formed in 1985, over half a million volunteers have helped NRCS with its conservation mission.

Find out how to become an Earth Team volunteer in your community.

DOD Urges Troops, Civilians to Watch for Human Trafficking

By Lisa Daniel
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON  – From the nightclub waitress you meet on deployment to the young man who launders your uniform at the drycleaners back home, Defense Department officials are warning military members and civilians to be on the lookout for possible victims of human trafficking.

The request for vigilance is part of an effort throughout the federal government to stop human trafficking, a form of modern slavery that forces millions of men, women and children from every country of the world into forced labor, prostitution, involuntary servitude and debt bondage, according to DOD and State Department officials. Some 2 million children are believed to move through the global sex trade each year, according to the State Department’s annual assessment on human trafficking.

The United Nations, the United States and other governments in the past decade have passed stricter laws and allocated more resources in the fight against human trafficking, and President Barack Obama declared January as National Slavery and Human Trafficking Prevention Month.

In the government’s interagency approach toward prevention, prosecution and protection involving human trafficking, the Defense Department’s role is one of prevention, according to John F. Awtrey, DOD’s director of law enforcement policy and support, part of the department’s personnel and readiness office.

Human trafficking is a worldwide phenomenon -- No. 3 behind drugs and weapons, Awtrey said in a Jan. 31 interview with the Pentagon Channel and American Forces Press Service.

“While traffic victims generally come from the poor places in the world, their destination … is all over the world,” Awtrey said. “A lot of countries where our service members are deployed have evidence of a lot of trafficking, and it’s here in the United States as well.”

DOD’s role primarily is of prevention and, specifically, education so that service members and civilian employees can report suspicious activity, Awtrey said.

“We don’t want our service members to be inadvertent supporters of trafficking,” he said. “It’s a crime; it’s a criminal business enterprise. And the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who say, ‘Well, I just go there to get some drinks,’ if it’s a place where the women working in there have been trafficked and are being held against their will, then you’re supporting that business.”

The Defense Department began training all service members and civilians on indicators of human trafficking after some service members were found in 2004 to be patronizing businesses in Korea involved in trafficking women from Russia and the Philippines, Awtrey said.

Since then, the Uniform Code of Military Justice has made it illegal for service members to visit brothels -- the main business involved in human trafficking, Awtrey said. Other businesses common to human trafficking are nightclubs and bars, restaurants, spas, nail salons and dry cleaners, as well as domestic work in people’s homes.

Evidence of human trafficking can be hard to spot, Awtrey acknowledged. “It takes people using their sixth sense to say ‘Something isn’t right here,’” he said.

A high turnover of young workers and an inordinate amount of private security are indications, he added.

“If you see something that’s odd, … if there seems to be too much security, … if you’re in the middle of America or you’re downtown in Germany … and there are people [in a restaurant] that look like guards, those guards are there to keep the workers from talking to you about something they shouldn’t, or from escaping,” Awtrey said.

It was that kind of vigilance from an employee at Fort Campbell, Ky., that allowed the FBI to break up a human trafficking ring in the surrounding community, Awtrey said. The worker frequented a Chinese restaurant off base in Tennessee about once a month and noticed every time he was there, the staff -- all young -- was new. His hunch was right.

“That’s part of trafficking -- that they never keep people in the same place for long,” Awtrey said. “In human trafficking, unlike with drugs and weapons, people can be sold over and over again. They are a reusable commodity, unfortunately.”

Human trafficking usually occurs not on military installations, but in the surrounding communities. The exception has been overseas, where it was found among subcontractors in Iraq who brought in foreign workers, confiscated their passports, and paid them far below what they were promised, Awtrey said. “We came down hard in Iraq” to correct the problem, he said, but it requires constant vigilance.

“It sounds simple enough sitting around a room at the Pentagon, but making sure it happens on the ground [in theater] is another story,” he said.

Suspected human trafficking should be reported up the military chain of command, to local authorities, or to the nonprofit National Human Trafficking Resource Center at 1-888-3737-888.

Demand Grows for Squad-level Linguist Program

By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

MONTEREY, Calif., Oct. 26, 2011 – Last year, 74 soldiers at Fort Campbell, Ky., became the first to participate in a new program that provides short-term, intensive language and cultural training to deploying military members.

The general purpose force program wasn’t designed for professional linguists or interpreters, explained Sam Garzaniti, who manages it at the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center here.

Rather, the program provides basic Dari or Pashto instruction, taught by native Afghan speakers, to help nonlinguists -- military police, medics, truck drivers and infantrymen, among them, -- operate more effectively on the ground in Afghanistan.

Retired Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal came up with the concept when he commanded the International Security Assistance Force to create what deployed forces refer to as “squad-designated linguists” able to communicate with the Afghan people. Graduates of the program proved so beneficial to their deployed units that it’s now growing by leaps and bounds.

Fort Carson, Colo., one of three pilot sites when the program stood up last year, soon sent almost 300 soldiers to a condensed version of the training before they deployed. The vast majority studied Dari, with the other 49 soldiers learning Pashto. Fort Drum, N.Y., also in the pilot program, sent 55 10th Mountain Division soldiers to its initial general purpose force training.

“After that, it has just been a steady flow of classes,” Garzaniti said. Schofield Barracks in Hawaii signed on to the program in September 2010. Fort Bragg, N.C., followed earlier this year.

The Marines jumped on board, too, with Camp Lejeune, N.C., and Camp Pendleton, Calif., joining the program last fall.

To date, about 1,000 service members have completed the program, Garzaniti said. He expects more enrollment in the program as word about it spreads.

Classes typically run 13 to 16 weeks, with students spending as much as six hours a day in the classroom, in addition to practice sessions and mandatory study halls.

Unlike other Defense Language Institute programs, the general purpose force curriculum focuses on listening and speaking skills, Garzaniti said. Students learn vocabulary and verb tenses and how to construct sentences. Then they practice using them in various scenarios similar to what they might encounter in Afghanistan.

“It’s a very-focused program,” Garzaniti said. “We’re not going for global proficiency. We are going for tactical functionality.”

Graduates aren’t meant to take the place of professional linguists and interpreters, he said. For example, they typically aren’t able to discuss the news with local Afghans. They can, however, ask for directions or share pleasantries over tea or during key leader engagements.

They also have the skills to ask questions and understand responses at roadblocks and read street signs and even graffiti on walls that may provide clues about insurgent activities.

“That makes them a force multiplier,” Garzaniti said. “When they go out and do their operations, whatever they may be, having somebody there in the front able to at least greet [the Afghans] and lay groundwork for something makes a huge difference. They are somebody to help.”

Returning units report that even limited language and cultural skills have helped them in their mission. “We’ve gotten a lot of good feedback from people who have been in country saying, ‘Hey, this works absolutely great,’” Garzaniti said. “They tell you that you speak two words and you see a face light up.”

A professional linguist himself who retired from the Army last year, Garzaniti said he has seen firsthand the impact language ability had on the Afghans we encountered.

“They know you took the time to learn at least a few words, a phrase, two phrases,” he said. “It makes all the difference in the world.”

More units are signing up as the message spreads about general purpose force training availability, Garzaniti said.

“I definitely don’t see any slowdown in business,” he said. “As more commanders hear the good stories from our brigades and battalions and companies that have used these people [during deployments], we see them starting to put their hands up and asking, ‘What about me?’”

Army suicides to top 2008, but progress reported

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON – Soldier suicides this year are almost sure to top last year's grim totals, but a recent decline in the pace of such incidents could mean the Army is starting to make progress in stemming them, officials said Tuesday.

Army Vice Chief of Staff General Peter Chiarelli said that as of Monday, 140 active duty soldiers were believed to have died of self-inflicted wounds so far in 2009. That's the same as were confirmed for all of 2008.

"We are almost certainly going to end the year higher than last year ... this is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way," he said.

But Chiarelli said there has been a tapering off in recent months from large surges in suspected suicides in January and February.

"Our goal since the beginning has been to reduce the overall incidence of suicide and I do believe we are finally beginning to see progress being made," Chiarelli told a Pentagon press conference.

He attributed those hints of a turning to some unprecedented efforts the Army has made since February to educate soldiers and leaders about the issue.

Officials are still stumped about what is driving the historically high rates across the military force. When asked whether the rates reflect unprecedented high stress from long and repeated deployments to provide manpower for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Chiarelli said he didn't know.

"The reality is there is no simple answer," he said. "Each suicide is as unique as the individuals themselves."

Chiarelli said that on top of the 140 suicides reported from the active duty force, there were another 71 suicides by troops in the National Guard and Reserve.

All of the numbers are preliminary in that investigations into some of the deaths are still ongoing. Of the 140 so far this year among active duty troops, 90 have been confirmed as suicides and 50 are suspected but the probes are not yet finished.

Each year, nearly all suspected suicides are eventually confirmed. For instance in 2008, there were 143 suspected and 140 were eventually confirmed.

Chiarelli said officials will continue to focus on things that are symptoms of high-risk individuals such as undiagnosed brain injuries like concussions; on Post-Traumatic Stress, and on risky behavior such as poor diet and sleep habits as well as more serious behaviors such as drug and alcohol abuse.

The Army widened its suicide prevention in March in an attempt to make rapid improvements. In October, the service introduced its Comprehensive Soldier Fitness program, which Chiarelli called "the biggest step ... taken to enhance wellness in the entire force through prevention rather than treatment."

The program aims to put the same emphasis on mental and emotion strength as the military traditionally has on physical strength. Basic training now includes anti-stress programs as part of a broader effort to help soldiers deal with the aftereffects of combat and prevent suicides.

Also last month, the Army started using a new screening questionnaire to try to determine preexisting or current mental health issues among troops as part of the enlistment process.

Despite those campaigns, another jump in suicide figures for 2009 would make it the fifth straight year that such deaths have set a record within the military. Last year's 140 record erased a high 115 in 2007 and 102 in 2006.

Chiarelli said officials are concerned with increases this year at Fort Campbell, Fort Stewart and Schofield Barracks and are trying to learn why suicides rates are down at Fort Hood, Fort Bragg and Fort Drum.

At Fort Campbell in Kentucky there were 18, while at Fort Bragg, N.C., which has almost double the population, there have been six all year.

Using some bases as examples of the trend downward, Chiarelli said that of the 18 suicides reported this year at Fort Campbell, 11 of those were in the first four months of the year. At Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, there were seven all year so far — five in the first five months of the year and only two since.

The numbers kept by the service branches don't show the whole picture of war-related suicides because they don't include deaths after people have left the military. The Department of Veterans Affairs tracks those numbers and says there were 144 suicides among the nearly 500,000 service members who left the military from 2002-2005 after fighting in at least one of the wars.

The true incidence of suicide among military veterans is not known, according to a report last year by the Congressional Research Service. Based on numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the VA estimates that 18 veterans a day — or 6,500 a year — take their lives, but that number includes vets from all previous wars.

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On the Net: http://www.army.mil