Fort Dix

Despite the prospect of a dwindling workforce at Fort Dix, the military base's new chief of staff is looking forward to "the challenge of the changes" that will take place there in the next three years. Col. Michael L. Warner, who began his new duties in June, said he thought that although its basic-training operations were being scaled down, Fort Dix remained a "great place to be. " Two years ago, the Army announced that Dix's basic-training mission would be phased out by 1993.

Many are 18 years old and heading overseas for the first time. Some are mothers in their 40s with 18-year-old sons and daughters. They arrive at Fort Dix from all over the country, with different accents, backgrounds and family issues - about 14,000 troops since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But before they go - possibly to war with Iraq - each is prepared by a group of military and civilian professionals who sweat every detail, no matter how small. The group's mission, as the American military machine shifts into high gear, is to make sure Army reservists and National Guard troops have the knowledge and tools to survive.

Bunk beds held clean mattresses, fluffy pillows, and neatly folded green blankets. The drawers of metal lockers waited to be filled. And showers, bathrooms and laundry rooms were a few steps away across slippery tile floors. For a while, these simple accommodations - in dormitories once used by Army reservists here - will be home for hundreds of Kosovar refugees who are expected to begin moving in this week. As many as 400 will arrive as early as Tuesday followed by hundreds, possibly thousands more over the next few weeks.

Deborah A. Davis, a lifetime Springfield resident and chief of the petroleum, oil and lubricants branch's supply division at Fort Dix, has been honored as top civilian employee for the most recent quarter at Fort Dix. "I love working outside," said Davis, 32. "I'd rather be outside than pushing papers. " But she has to do a lot of that, too, because in her 5 1/2 years on this job, she's been in charge of all the fuel oil arriving at Fort Dix, the New Jersey Army Reserve centers and the New York Area Army Command - 69 delivery locations in all. Normally, she handles this by phone, but she has a different goal in mind down the road.

Within the next month, nearly half of the civilian employees at Fort Dix will get a letter in the mail telling them that they might be transferred or terminated or fired by next fall. The Army calls it a mock reduction in force - an effort to give civilian employees ample warning of how they may be affected by cuts mandated in late 1988. The decision to take away Fort Dix's basic training mission was made almost three years ago, but Oct. 4 was the first announcement by the Army of the exact number of civilian employees who will be affected by the realignment.

Fort Dix inched closer to the end of its career as a training base yesterday as the House rejected an attempt to stop the Pentagon's plans to close or scale back operations at 14 military bases, including the Burlington County installation. Before approving an $8.7 billion military construction appropriations bill for 1990, the House removed from the bill an amendment that would have forbidden the Pentagon to use money to close or reduce operations at bases where timely cost savings could not be demonstrated.

In September of the lean, grim year 1940, John Dimon joined the 44th Division of the New Jersey National Guard. Five days later, called up for full-time service that was to last more than five years, Dimon stood inside Fort Dix. Or what there was of it. "We didn't have any uniforms. We didn't have any guns. We didn't have anything," Dimon said. "We lived in tents. It was a tough life. " It was the eve of the United States' entry into the Second World War. And it was the eve of Fort Dix's rise from a primitive Pine Barrens outpost to a booming soldier-metropolis five years later.

In the weeks after the Department of Defense recommended the virtual closing of Fort Dix, Pemberton Township Mayor Thalia C. Kay has emerged as a leader in the effort to cushion the potentially disastrous effects of a closing. Kay returned on Sunday to Pemberton Township from a five-day trip to Washington, D.C., where she met with Rep. Jim Saxton (R., N.J.) and Don Hester, an aide to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), to discuss strategies for dealing with the Pentagon's recommendation.

Military housing at Fort Dix will be occupied even after the base loses its major role as a basic training facility, an Army spokesman said yesterday. The 2,106 units have been offered to the Air Force, Navy and Coast Guard, which have all shown interest in them, according to Maj. Joe Padilla, an Army spokesman in Washington. Whether the housing units are occupied is crucial to Pemberton Township, where about 1,800 of that municipality's 7,700 school students are children who live at Fort Dix. Children with military parents account for 3,120 of Pemberton's school enrollment.

The Army almost closed Fort Dix, the place that turned so many of us into semiprofessional killers. Training of reserves will continue, but on a smaller scale. I was drafted late in the Korean War, when we knew it would be a tie, and I was sent for basic training to Dix's 60th Infantry Regiment. Its motto, "To the utmost extent of our power," was almost as unwieldy as I, a flat-footed scrawny baccalaureate who knew the Army was something to be mocked while you made notes for your first book.

Richard T. Byrnes Sr., 98, of West Chester, a self-made businessman, died Wednesday, Dec. 21, of dementia at Wellington Terrace, a nursing facility in West Chester. Mr. Byrnes founded Richard T. Byrnes Co. Inc. in 1945. The firm grew to become a major importer and supplier of woodworking machinery in America. Born in New York City, Mr. Byrnes graduated in 1930 from Newtown High School in Elmhurst, N.Y., and attended Cathedral College. He worked for a while in sales for R.H. Macy & Co. in New York City and for the Queens Utility Co. At age 21, he founded his first business, Interstate Refrigeration Co., also in New York City.

Henry Dick Sayer III, 72, of Huntingdon Valley, an architect who chaired Willow Grove's tricentennial celebration this year, died of colon cancer on Tuesday, Nov. 22, at home. Mr. Sayer and his committee spent two years planning the 300th anniversary of Willow Grove's founding. The official opening, a parade down Easton Road, took place May 1, the day he was diagnosed with cancer. The six-week celebration included a community day, concerts, historical tours, and lectures.

Their job was protecting convoys, which meant they had to travel the dangerous roads of southern Aghanistan almost daily. The 100 or so men of the Pennsylvania National Guard's 131st Transportation Company, some of whom trained in Northeast Philadelphia, had been in the war zone since January without having anyone killed. But their luck came to an awful end Monday in the thundering blast of an improvised bomb planted along a road outside of Bagram. Guard officials announced that three soldiers were killed in the explosion and that five others were wounded.

She likened herself to a mayor, like those in the 10 municipalities around her. But Air Force Brig. Gen. Gina M. Grosso, who Friday relinquished command of New Jersey's largest military base, had many responsibilities her civilian counterparts don't have. She was the first commander of the nation's only contiguous tri-service base - and held that job during a historic melding process. She replaced the commanders of McGuire Air Force Base, Fort Dix, and Lakehurst Naval Air Engineering Station, installations spread over 65 square miles of Burlington and Ocean Counties.

Wiretaps obtained under a Patriot Act provision aimed at gathering foreign intelligence wrongly helped convict Muslim immigrants in a domestic criminal case, defense lawyers argued yesterday in U.S. appeals court in Philadelphia. The lawyers represent five young men convicted of plotting a deadly strike at Fort Dix, N.J. A federal jury in Camden convicted the men - Mohamad Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka - in 2008 of conspiring to kill U.S. military personnel at Fort Dix. All but Tatar are serving life terms.

In the middle of the spectator section at Philadelphia federal court Monday sat Ferik Duka, whose three sons were among five men convicted in 2008 of plotting to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix. As the Duka brothers enter the third year of their life sentences, their father listened as a three-judge panel heard nearly two hours of arguments for why the Fort Dix Five should, or shouldn't, get second trials. Nodding toward the table where a team of prosecutors sat, the senior Duka defended his sons.

It's an uphill battle, they privately concede, and given the evidence and tenor of the times, they are decided underdogs. But lawyers for the Fort Dix Five will get a chance Monday to convince a federal appellate panel that their clients' convictions should be overturned or, alternatively, that the five imprisoned terrorists should be granted new trials. The hearing is scheduled for 1:30 p.m. before a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.

The Christmas letter was sealed with hope, sent to a son behind bars from a heartbroken mother who played a role in putting him there. "Dear Brian, I hope you never get this," Sue Aitken's card to her son, Brian, began. Aitken, 27, serving a seven-year sentence in New Jersey for possessing handguns he purchased legally in Colorado, might walk out of Mid-State Correctional Facility before the card arrives, though, after Gov. Chris Christie signed a letter yesterday commuting his sentence to time served.

Of all the memories Fred Connolly has of the Korean War, it is the killing of a 10-year-old girl that most haunts him. Connolly's Army unit had befriended the child and her family as it passed through their village. Soldiers gave them rations, candy, and cigarettes. When the GIs returned, they found three adults in the group dead and two toddlers crying next to their bodies. But it is the little girl that Connolly, of Turnersville, Gloucester County, remembers - especially on military observances such as Veterans Day - when he thinks back to his service.

There is an increased risk of forest and brush fires in the Philadelphia area because there has been no rain for two weeks, the National Weather Service says. The NWS has issued a fire weather watch for Wednesday afternoon through Wednesday evening, when temperatures will get up to 90 and wind gusts of 25 mph to 35 mph are expected. The watch covers Southeastern Pennsylvania, most of New Jersey and northern Delaware. Although there is the possibility of showers or isolated thunderstorms Wednesday morning, they will be brief and rainfall amounts will be less than a quarter-inch, the weather service says.