Deployed Inside the United States: The Military Waits for the Migrant Caravan
With little electricity, no combat pay and holidays away from home, the 5,600 American troops on the southwest border are on a mission ordered by a politically determined commander in chief and a Pentagon unable to convince him of its perils.
The midterm elections are over, along with President Trump’s rafter-shaking rallies warning that an approaching migrant caravan of Central Americans amounts to a foreign “invasion” that warrants deploying up to 15,000 active-duty military troops to the border states of Texas, Arizona and California.
But the 5,600 American troops who rushed to the brown, dry scrub along the southwest border are still going through the motions of an elaborate mission that appeared to be set into action by a commander in chief determined to get his supporters to the polls.
In the last several days, the soldiers installed a small shower tent. Men and women have set hours for bathing. There is no mess hall, just the brown, prepackaged M.R.E.’s. The tents sleep 20 soldiers and have no electricity or air-conditioning. Phone charging is relegated to a few generators that power the spotlights around the living area. Some soldiers slowly began digging a trench outside their tents, to keep water from pooling around their cots and their feet in the coming rain. Others shuffled to port-a-potties and foot-powered sinks to shave and brush their teeth.
Instead of football with their families on this Veterans Day weekend, soldiers with the 19th Engineer Battalion, fresh from Fort Knox, Ky., were painstakingly webbing concertina wire on the banks of the Rio Grande. The deployment orders last until Dec. 15, meaning the troops will be on the border over Thanksgiving.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/10/us/deployed-inside-the-united-states-the-military-waits-for-the-migrant-caravan.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
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