Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the man tapped to take over the American war effort in Afghanistan, has served at Fort Lewis. He commanded 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment from November 1994 to June 1996, before he left for a year to attend Harvard University.

The head of Madigan Army Medical Center received a big honor when the USO recognized Maj. Gen. Patricia Horoho as its military woman of the year at a banquet in New York on Tuesday.

The Military Leadership Award is presented each year to "female service members who embody the USO's mission and values," according to an Army press release. The USO is an independent nonprofit organization that provides recreation and morale service to American service members across the world.

Horoho, who also commands the Army Nurse Corps and the Western Regional Medical Command, took over at Madigan in July 2008.

Gen. George Casey, the Army chief of staff, will visit Fort Lewis tomorrow to visit with soldiers and attend an after-action review for a Minnesota National Guard unit soon deploying to Iraq.

The 60-year-old general will preside over a promotion ceremony for several Fort Lewis noncommissioned officers, according to a post press release, and then award the Army Commendation Medal to a 3rd Stryker Brigade soldier who provided first aid to a 7-year-old girl injured in a car accident.

He also will meet with soldiers from the 34th Red Bull Infantry Division, the Minnesota Guard unit that will soon oversee daily operations in southern Iraq. (For those steeped in the lingo, the division is taking over from the 10th Mountain Division as Multi-National Division-South.)

Casey has been chief of staff since April 2007; before that, he was the commander of Multi-National Force-Iraq.

(U.S. Army photo)

When last we heard from Lt. Gen. James Dubik in September, the former Fort Lewis commander had just returned from a year-long stint overseeing the training of Iraqi Security Forces and was in the first days of retirement from a fine Army career.

The pace must've been too slow for him. The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) announced last week that Dubik has joined the Washington D.C.-based organization as its first senior fellow. He will do research, write policy papers and brief policy makers.

ISW President Kimberly Kagan said in a prepared statement:

General Dubik will be an excellent asset to ISW. His expertise on Iraq's Security Forces will contribute to ISW's robust research program on the conflict, especially as the United States and Iraq implement their new security agreement in 2009. General Dubik's extensive experience in professional military education will enhance ISW's ability to bridge the gap between senior civilian policy makers and officers.

Dubik took command of Multi National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) in June 2007. Before that, he was the commanding general of Fort Lewis and I Corps for 2 1/2 years.

When Heidi Brown began her military career, the long-term opportunities for women in uniform were uncertain. And the Texas native wasn’t entirely sure about her future in the Army, either.

“I was going to do five years” she said Friday.

She graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1981 – part of only the second class at West Point that included women.

Since then, she has helped forge a path for women in the Air Defense Artillery, the Army branch that operates anti-aircraft weapons.

Brown’s groundbreaking career took another significant step Friday when she received a promotion to brigadier general, becoming the first female general officer in the history of I Corps and the Air Defense Artillery.

“Throughout her career, Heidi has been a pioneer, a trailblazer, a difference maker, forging her own path, creating her own destiny with skill and determination and never taking no for an answer.” said I Corps commander Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby, who pinned the general’s star on Brown.

=> Read more!

Carter Ham is known as a "soldier’s general", the guys at Fort Lewis say. Cares about his guys. Sees soldiers as people, not pins on a tactical map.

I talked with one senior enlisted soldier today – don’t want to use his name because we were just chatting and I’m not sure he knew I might use his anecdote – who got hurt pretty badly in Iraq. As he was being evacuated, Ham had tears in his eyes. The general promised the soldier he would get the best care the Army could provide.

He’s a riser: Ham arrived in Fort Lewis in August 2003 as a brigadier general. Just months later, he was in Mosul, Iraq, leading Task Force Olympia. He oversaw combat operations by two Fort Lewis-based Stryker brigades, among a portfolio of other responsibilities. Now the 56-year-old is a four-star general and commands all American soldiers in Europe.

But the effects of his tour in Iraq have lingered. According to an interview with USA Today, he didn't sleep well after he returned. Loud noises startled him. He sought treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The USA Today story not only reaffirms Ham’s reputation as a soldier’s general, but it’s also one of the first times such a high-ranking official has openly talked about suffering from PTSD.

From the story:

The mess-hall bombing stands out in Carter Ham's mind. "Not a day goes by when I don't think about it," he says. But the cumulative effect of making decisions that put troops in harms' way gnawed at him as well.

"You'd get to the middle of the month and you'd say, 'You know, we haven't had anybody killed this month. Can we get through one month? Can we get through just one month without getting somebody killed?' "

And here’s a quote from Ham’s wife, Christi

"When he came back, all of him didn't come back. … Pieces of him the way he used to be were perhaps left back there," says his wife, Christi. "I didn't get the whole guy I'd sent away."

Check out the article if you have a few minutes. One of the best stories you'll read today.

At our newspaper, we don't publish a lot of so-called "handout" photos provided by the U.S. military. We have our own staff photographers to take images at Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base, and we rely on wire service photographers for news overseas.

But an AP story today about a doctored photo of a prestigious Army newsmaker gives us food for thought.

The Associated Press on Friday suspended the use of photos provided by the Defense Department after the Army distributed a digitally altered photo of the U.S. military’s first female four-star general.
The image of Army Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody is the second Army-provided photo the AP has eliminated from its service in the last two months.
The AP said that adjusting photos and other imagery, even for aesthetic reasons, damages the credibility of the information distributed by the military to news organizations and the public.
“For us, there’s a zero-tolerance policy of adding or subtracting actual content from an image,” said Santiago Lyon, the AP’s director of photography.
Lyon said the AP is developing procedures to protect against further occurrences and, once those steps are in place, it will consider lifting the ban. He said the AP is also discussing the problem with the military.
Col. Cathy Abbott, chief of the Army’s media relations division, said the Dunwoody photo did not violate Army policy that prohibits the cropping or editing of a photo to misrepresent the facts or change the circumstances of an event.
In the original photo, the general appears to be sitting at a desk with a credenza and bookshelf behind her. Three stars on her uniform identify her as a lieutenant general, her rank before Friday’s promotion.
The altered photo, distributed by the Army and run on the AP’s photo wire Thursday, shows Dunwoody in fatigues in front of an American flag. Her rank, affixed to the front of a soldier’s tunic, is not visible.
“We’re not misrepresenting her,” Abbott said. “The image is still clearly Gen. Dunwoody.”

What do you think? Should the military be manipulating photographs this way? Is the news media overreacting?

Incidentally, we are putting a story about Dunwoody's historic promotion on Page A3 Saturday. Accompanying it will be a picture taken by a wire service photojournalist during Friday's ceremony at the Pentagon.

UPDATED 11/17/2008: Fort Lewis spokeswoman Catherine Caruso called to make it clear that Fort Lewis does not manipulate photos it provides to the media. This would be a violation of Army regulation 360-1, Chapter 13-4. (Read it here.)

"We don't take things out of photos and we don't put them in," Caruso called to tell me. "The second you make a change like that, it becomes a photo illustration."

The Department of Defense must've been working off different sheet music in the Dunwoody case.

The most common type of Army "handout" photos we use at the TNT -- mug shots of soldiers who died in the line of duty -- are typically provided by family members, with Fort Lewis as a third-party conduit. Army public affairs specialists can't vouch for the integrity of those photos, Caruso said, although they do reject them if it's obvious they were altered.

Digging out after a nice two-week vacation. ... Fort Lewis' new deputy commanding general, Brig. Gen. John D. Johnson, is on the promotion list to major general that (finally) came out Tuesday. (I say finally because I am told this promotion board met back in October 2007 and only now are the announcements coming out.)

Anyway, the list includes a number of other Fort Lewis alumni, the most recent being Brig. Gen. Donald Campbell, who was here for what seemed like just a cup of coffee before moving on to Fort Knox. Others, I'm told, include Brig. Gens. John M. Bednarek (a former 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment commander), Gina S. Farrisee, Michael Ferriter and Gregg F. Martin.

Not that there's a shortage of pachyderms at the post these days. There are more general officers at Lewis now than at any time in recent memory (OK, my recent memory going back eight years now).

For those of you scoring at home, they are:

• Lt. Gen. Charles Jacoby, the I Corps and Fort Lewis commander.

• Maj. Gen. Patricia D. Horoho, the new commander at Madigan Army Medical Center and chief of the U.S. Army Nurse Corps.

• Brig. Gen. Peter C. Bayer, the new I Corps chief of staff.

• Johnson, the deputy commanding general for operations.

• Brig. Gen. Jeff W. Mathis, the rear detachment deputy commanding general.

• Col. Heidi V. Brown was nominated July 15 for brigadier general. She's the I Corps effects coordinator.

• Col. Brett Daugherty, installed as commander of the Washington National Guard's 66th Theater Aviation Command in June, is also scheduled for promotion to brigadier general.