Out of sight, out of mind: In Lithuania and Yemen, Trump is out of the loop on grave military matters

It is one of the tragic truths of military life that oftentimes a soldier has to die before anyone notices where the soldiers are and what they’re doing there. This was the case last week in Lithuania when four American soldiers from the First Armored Brigade of the Third Infantry Division went missing after their M88 armored recovery vehicle disappeared in what is described as a peat bog during a training exercise near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.

The bodies of three of the four soldiers were recovered Monday after a week-long effort to pull the M88 from the swampy bog. Their names have not been announced by the army, and efforts continue to find the body of the fourth soldier who remains missing.

President Trump was asked during a press availability at the White House last week if he had been briefed on the disappearance of the soldiers in Lithuania. He replied that he had not, and the questioning from reporters moved on to other topics.

This is sadly typical of what happens when soldiers are lost in training accidents, which happen all the time. When soldiers aren't at war, they are training, and much of what they do is dangerous. The M88 is what amounts to a 140,000-pound armored tow truck, equipped to pull other armored vehicles such as M1A1 tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers that have either broken down or somehow gotten stuck in mud or snow or in a ditch. The army hasn't announced what the mission was that the soldiers were on, other than to say they had been sent out to recover another vehicle that had broken down. It isn't clear yet what happened to send the M88 into the peat bog, but it is suspected that the vehicle was moving down a road and somehow slipped into the swampy waters of the bog. I were to guess, I'd say the M88 was probably lost at night when visibility was poor, and the road through a dense forest was unmarked.

The thing about armored vehicles is that, protected by their thick armor, you feel safe until something goes wrong. Then, as apparently happened with the incident in Lithuania, when the vehicle gets trapped and sinks into the bog, the crew is unable to escape.

Here is what may have happened. The M88 and its crew were being held in reserve and were sent out on the recovery mission when news came in over the radio that another vehicle was in trouble. Using a powerful winch, the M88 recovery vehicle can pull something that weighs up to 140,000 pounds out of trouble or lift a vehicle weighing up to 35,000 pounds using its crane-like boom. The M88 typically has a crew of three: a vehicle commander, a driver and a third soldier to assist in extractions. The three bodies that were recovered were found inside the vehicle. It is not known what happened to the fourth body, but he was probably the vehicle commander and was standing in the commander’s cupola at the time the M88 slipped off the road into the bog and was able to jump free, only to get sucked into the bog along with the M88.

I don't know how long the Third Infantry Division has been in Lithuania, but I do know what they're doing over there. They are deterring Vladimir Putin from any thought he has that he and his puppet president of Belarus might decide to roll over the Baltic states and Poland when Russia gets through with Ukraine, as unlikely as any of that might seem at this point in the three-year war Ukraine has fought for its survival.

This is an excerpt from my weekly column in Salon. To read the rest of the column, go here:

Out of sight, out of mind