[Washington Examiner] I’m standing in an air base in northeastern Romania looking at the incontrovertible truth that there’s something different about Russia’s aggression this time: the NATO Very High Readiness Joint Task Force, aka the men and women responsible for stopping World War III. The task force, a "spearhead" of the free world's military, has been deployed for the very first time. "Two hundred nautical miles away, there’s a hot war going on across the Black Sea right now," U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Matthew Van Wagenen tells me. This plot of land — MK Air Base, outside the resort city of Constanta, and the front-line NATO countries of which it's a part — "this is the edge of freedom."
In any given year since the VJTF was created, one country has to keep soldiers ready to deploy as quickly as possible, while another trains to take over the next year. This year, it’s a joint French-Belgian group, 800 soldiers who got here in two days and five days, respectively, after they got orders. The French flew in their tanks, and the Belgians drove theirs on a massive truck convoy across Europe. In the tents where the French and Belgian Very High Readiness Task Force members actually live, it smells a little like sweat. The Belgian and French barracks tents are arranged in rows, with a few supplemental Dutch tents off to the side. The French and Belgians have separate tents for the female soldiers, but the Dutch, thinking that prim, sleep coed. Nico, a French paramedic driver of an armored personnel carrier ambulance, sits at a table across from the rest of his unit as they take apart, oil, and put back together a .50-caliber machine gun. On the wall, there’s a map of Ukraine, with the areas of high conflict shaded red, and another chart of their upcoming exercises. Last week, they did a training exercise near the Ukrainian border in Smardan, Romania, with American forces involving artillery, among other things learning NATO procedures and practicing commands in English. This week, they are off for Orthodox Easter, and the week after, it’s tank exercises with Belgians and the Polish. Nico says they spend a normal day doing three things: "Practicing, practicing, practicing." Their families, someone says, are worried about them here. "We left a bit fast, because when we were deployed, we had 24 hours to say goodbye. It was a bit stressful for them. But they are proud." |