Ahem...I beg to differ.
While the type of exercise is unprecedented, Russian troops -- and a lot more of them -- actually trained here nearly 17 years ago. A little-known exercise called "Peacekeeper 95", held in late October 1995 at Fort Riley, Kansas, holds the distinction of being the first. About 200 Russians descended on the post to train in what would lead up to the Implementation Force (or IFOR), that little operation in Bosnia-Herzegovina that most Americans have long since forgotten about.
I should know about PK95, because I was there. Once upon a time, young Sergeant Powell was a Russian linguist and part of the Big Red One. I had been tagged as part of a team of translators to support the planning conferences leading up to the exercise, for about six months. This mainly entailed translating mountains of PowerPoint slides, menus, hotel brochures, and everything else that the Russian planning officers would need when they came (about three times in that six months) -- and during the conferences, we were the wallflowers that fetched coffee while the "real" translators from the On-Site Inspection Agency did the hardcore stuff in the front of the room. At night, the Division would pay for us to go eat dinner with the Russians.
During one of those conferences, we were riding to dinner and I was sitting next to a State Department translator who had never been in the military. He asked me about a sign we passed that said "DRMO". When I explained to him that the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office sold old military equipment to the public, he laughed and said, "That's funny, because the Russian word дерьмо [pronounced der-MO] means 'shit'." And that is why I will never forget that word.
During the actual exercise in October, I got to interact a little with the soldiers, who were relegated to some very Spartan barracks on Fort Riley's back-forty so they wouldn't get the defection bug or get sticky fingers in the PX. They were all wide-eyed as you can imagine, having only heard about America in breathless whispers while growing up under Soviet rule. One of them had me buy him some Polaroid film from the PX (and if I can ever find the pic he gave me, I will scan and upload it). From what I saw, they were little different than Americans -- jovial, eager to speak with me since I knew their language, and good at what they did.
Another time, I was chatting with a couple of fellow American soldiers who were tasked to be the drivers for several of the senior Russian officers including their Division commander, Colonel Averyanov, outside the Colonel's quarters. The Russian strode out of the building, and the drivers stopped what they were doing to let them in the tactical vehicles (HMMWV's). As Colonel Averyanov entered his, he sternly said to me in Russian (and I'm paraphrasing here), "Tell my driver that in Russia, I could have my driver executed for failing to display the utmost discipline." In other words the American soldier, in the Russian's eyes, committed the capital crime of chatting with his buddies instead of standing at attention with the door open at the second the Colonel walked out. He might have been joking, but he sure sounded serious.
As a child of the Cold War, I am glad we never went to war with them. The very first time I even met them was at the first conference, about April 1995. All American officers on post were invited to the Officers' Club for a social with these Russian officers. As I stood nervously in the offing, my boss (then a Lt. Col.) asked me to introduce him to one of them. The first one I found was tall and stiff, and proudly announced that he was a General and the commander of the 27th Guards Motorized Rifle Division. The conversation was short -- I never was a great translator. On my way home that night, it struck me that had history gone a little differently, I might have been sending that General's location for artillery targeting while I was at my first unit in Germany (the storied 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, which guarded the Fulda Gap for many years) -- rather than chatting over an American beer.
One Friday afternoon in the exercise control center, an American Lt. Col. approached me and asked if I could accompany him and his Russian counterpart to dinner the next night as translator. Little did I know, but I was the lone Sergeant with five senior officers -- one Russian, two American, two Canadian, all JAG lawyers -- and I got to be the designated driver. After dinner we went to a club near Kansas State University, where these guys drank beer and tried to pick up college chicks all night...thankfully, to no avail. Located in the middle of famous Aggieville, the bar was packed beyond fire code since K-State had just trounced some smaller college on their home gridiron. Several times, I found myself trying to dance and translate at the same time. By midnight the crowded streets were literally wet with beer on all sides of the bars, and since the time changed back for Standard Time, we got an extra hour or revelry. After we got back on base, I had to carry the Russian officer in my truck across the post to his temporary quarters. I got pulled over for speeding by an MP, but after I yelled at the poor Private First Class for wasting our guest's time, he let me go with a nervous warning.
Later in the exercise, two other Russian colonels had me take them to Wal-Mart. They always loved going there, since Russia even today has nothing like it. One of these two bought Venetian blinds for his house; the other bought a chainsaw and extra parts that were very hard to come by back home. Good thing they were on a military transport.
It was all a very interesting experience, and part of who I am.
But, here is why it's all important. All the conspiracy wingnuts out there are claiming this current exercise is evidence of us giving over some control or our country to a former foe, that this is the start of a larger invasion, or that the current administration will use this as a foothold towards martial law. Some people wonder what would happen if we go to war with Iran -- Russia's ally -- while Russian troops are here. Realistically, absolutely nothing nefarious would happen. The Russians would be sent home on the next plane and we might meet them again on the battlefield. First off, we're not going to war with Iran any time in the foreseeable future. If we were, those Russians wouldn't have been here in the first place. Secondly, this kind of scenario has played itself out many times before in the last 40-50 years. Our military trains soldiers and officers from hundreds of different countries all the time in places such as Fort Benning, Georgia, Fort Leavenworth, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, and Garmisch, Germany. More foreign troops are always training at our officer schools -- in fact, in 2001 I sponsored a Ukrainian officer at Fort Gordon in the Signal Captains Career Course and we had others from Lithuania, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Korea in my class. In my estimation, at any given time we probably have around 1,000 foreign troops training on our soil.
Furthermore, there have been a myriad of historical events that caused some of those officers' home countries to go to war with allies of the U.S., or some other potentially embarrassing, international-political entanglement -- and some of those officers and their families were sent home. Case in point: during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, there were several Iranian officers who were studying here at Fort Leavenworth when their country took our citizens as hostages. Nothing nefarious happened, the officers went home, and Iran stopped attending the school. (There is a hall in our school that has large bronze plaques from the international students, with their countries and names -- after 1979, none of them shows Iran.) I've even heard stories of some international students here whose countries were taken over while the officers were in CGSC, and they were not quite sure if they even should return home, out of fear for themselves or their families. In fact, just look at Russian history again. In 1995, Russia was embroiled in the First Chechen War -- a war which we publicly condemned, although Chechnya was not our ally. Not one of the 200+ Russian troops in Kansas at the time invaded us.
But of course, this is all a great excuse to play a very closely related video clip.
