Mihail Kogălniceanu, Romania — The U.S. Army’s a hundred and first Airborne Division has been deployed to Europe for the primary time in nearly 80 years amid hovering rigidity between Russia and the American-led NATO army alliance. The sunshine infantry unit, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” is educated to deploy on any battlefield on the planet inside hours, able to struggle.
CBS News joined the division’s Deputy Commander, Brigadier Normal John Lubas, and Colonel Edwin Matthaidess, Commander of the 2nd Brigade Fight Staff, on a Black Hawk helicopter for the hour-long trip to the very fringe of NATO territory — solely round three miles from Romania’s border with Ukraine.
From the second Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, his forces have superior northward from the Crimean Peninsula, a Ukrainian area that Moscow illegally seized management of in 2014. For greater than seven months, Russian troops have tried to push alongside the Black Coastline into the Kherson area, aiming to seize the important thing Ukrainian port cities of Mykolaiv and Odesa.
Their objective is to chop off all Ukrainian entry to the ocean, leaving the nation and its army forces landlocked.
That risk, so near NATO territory in Romania, is why one among America’s most elite air assault divisions has been despatched in, with some heavy tools.
“We’re able to defend each inch of NATO soil,” Lubas advised CBS News. “We convey a singular functionality, from our air assault functionality… We’re a lightweight infantry power, however once more, we convey that mobility with us, for our plane and air assaults.”
Skirting northward alongside Romania’s Black Coastline, the Black Hawk ultimately touched down at a ahead working web site the place U.S. and Romanian troops had been pounding targets throughout a joint floor and air assault train.
The tank rounds and artillery hearth had been actual. The drill was meant to recreate the battles Ukraine’s forces are preventing day-after-day in opposition to Russian troops, simply throughout the border. The conflict video games so near that border are a transparent message to Russia and to America’s NATO allies, that the U.S. Army is right here.
“The actual which means for me, to have the American troops right here, is like should you had been to have allies in Normandy earlier than any enemy was there,” Romanian Main Normal Lulian Berdila advised CBS News, referring to the landmark World Conflict II battle on France’s north coast. The American forces have been establishing a garrison on the Romanian army’s air base.
In all, about 4,700 troopers from the a hundred and first Airborne’s house base in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, have been deployed to bolster NATO’s japanese flank.
Matthaidess advised CBS News that he and his troops had been the closest American forces to the preventing in Ukraine. From their vantage level, they have been “carefully watching” the Russian forces, “constructing aims to observe in opposition to” and conducting drills that “replicate precisely what is going on on” within the conflict.
“It retains us on our toes,” he mentioned.
The “Screaming Eagles” commanders advised CBS News repeatedly that they’re all the time “able to struggle tonight,” and whereas they’re there to defend NATO territory, if the preventing escalates or there’s any assault on NATO, they’re absolutely ready to cross the border into Ukraine.
