KXLY TV in Spokane interviewed the two Fort Lewis soldiers accused of deserting and then going on a petty crime spree to feed their addiction to prescription painkillers.

Below is the Spokane County Sheriff's Office press release about the arrests.

And I'm just going to leave it at that.

Deserters Nabbed In Mini-Crime Wave

A pair of U.S. Army deserters was arrested Tuesday after Spokane Valley property crimes detectives linked them to a series of thefts and other criminal incidents committed during the past two months.

Michael W. Grenkavich, 21, and Mitchell L. Rea, 22, have been living a transient lifestyle in Spokane since deserting from Ft. Lewis within two days of each other last July. Grenkavich had ties to the
Spokane area prior to enlisting in the military.

=> Read more!

The Army Times' Kelly Kennedy has a good piece this week about the use of hard labor in sentencing in UCMJ cases.

Her lead example is a former Fort Lewis private who was made to dig a trench in full battle rattle after he was sentenced to 45 days hard labor for peeing hot for cocaine.

Curious about what will happen, disciplinary action-wise, to the Army employee who took a government laptop home and put some 900 soldiers at risk for identity theft when a prowler swiped it from his unlocked truck?

We asked. Fort Lewis' answer, per a post spokesman:

"Regarding the laptop computer, this incident has been informally investigated by the employee's civilian supervisory chain of command. The result of the investigation is being handled as an administrative personnel action. Because this is an administrative personnel action the information is not releasable."

That Army laptop?

Never mind.

Tumwater police this morning told our friends at the Olympian that they recovered it Saturday or Sunday, and that it was returned at some point Thursday to "the owner" – not sure yet whether that means the Army, or the Army personnel staffer who left it in his unlocked truck at home in Lacey.

Tumwater police said it did not appear that any data had been accessed. A Fort Lewis spokeswoman said authorities there were checking it today to make sure, but declined further comment for the moment.

The Tumwater police told the Olympian they were called to the Motel 6 there on Saturday afternoon by a 17-year-old male who wanted to report his wallet stolen. Long story short, he wound up under arrest and booked into juvenile hall for suspicion of possession of stolen property and other offenses.

Tumwater detective Jennifer Kolb said police found numerous items from recent Tumwater and Lacey area car prowls in his car and at a home where he'd been staying recently.

Fort Lewis says they'll get back to us later today with more information about the recovery.

UPDATE: Fort Lewis PAO sent an e-mail at 10:34 a.m. following up on a couple questions (would've posted it sooner but I was out on another story).

In a nutshell, they say the Army has the laptop, and that the information is secure:

"According to Fort Lewis Criminal Investigation Command the computer and external hard drive have been examined by computer forensics experts. The robbers apparently tried to access the laptop, but were unsuccessful, and the external hard drive containing the Soldiers information had not been accessed since the last time that it had been used by the Fort Lewis employee. It's also worth noting that the routine security measures installed on the laptop computer prevented the efforts of the robbers to get access to the laptop."

KING TV reports that Fort Lewis soldiers are being warned to watch their credit reports after the recent theft of a laptop containing personal information about "thousands of soldiers." The TV report suggested the entire 4,000-soldier 4th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, just back from nearly 15 months in Iraq, may be at risk.

Fort Lewis officials told me "the premise of the KING 5 story is generally accurate," but said the computer contained information about 800-900 soldiers. They didn't identify the unit.

Otherwise, the post released a statement:

"The Army takes security of personal information extremely seriously, and we are investigating this incident fully. However, it is apparent that Army standards and policy regarding protection of this information were not followed, and we are making immediate changes to step up enforcement of these policies to prevent this from happening again. We know what information may have been compromised, and we have already begun the process of notifying the appropriate Soldiers. We are also committed to working with local authorities to pursue prosecution to the maximum extent possible if these Soldiers' information is misused."

Lots of follow up questions there. The post's public affairs shop says they'll have more details later today.

UPDATE, 2:50 p.m.: Still waiting on Fort Lewis PAO shop to answer some followup questions. Apparently since this has to do with three of the touchier food groups – law enforcement, information security and personnel – the answers have to go up and down several stove pipes for approval.

At any rate, our friends at the Olympian report that the theft occurred sometime between 9:30 p.m. July 3 and 10 a.m. July 4 from a Dodge pickup parked in the driveway in the 5500 block of 34th Avenue Southeast in Lacey. The reportee was listed as a federal employee of the U.S. Army. The reportee said there was no classified, secret or top secret information stored on the computer and an external 500 GB hard drive.

The reportee said he left the door of the truck unlocked.

Awaiting a copy of the police report.

UDPATE, UPDATE: Fort Lewis finally came through with some additional information shortly after 6 p.m., a mere eight hours after we posed some followup questions. Next time somebody tells me how long it takes to turn around a battle ship ...

I did a quick story for tomorrow's paper that I am posting here:

=> Read more!

Folks at the Fort Lewis public affairs office say they're starting to get a little suspicious about a rumor that keeps coming back to them that someone had released numerous horses onto the post's training range and that soldiers had shot them all.

"Somebody out there is spreading this rumor," spokesman Joe Piek said Friday. "There is absolutely no truth to it."

We got a call Friday morning from a woman who said she'd heard it from a local horse person, and directed us to a local veterinarian for confirmation. The vet said he knew nothing about any such report.

A Fort Lewis spokeswoman said the rumor first reached the post June 2, when an Eastern Washington wire service reporter working on a story about rising hay prices called to check it out. The reporter said she'd heard it from a truck driver.

Then Thursday, a reporter from an area weekly called the post and asked about it.

Post spokeswoman Catherine Caruso said she checked with range control officers and with investigators who track the post's extensive illegal dumping problem. No horse sightings.

"We have not had any reports of any horses – feral, abandoned, whatever – on Fort Lewis in quite some time," Caruso said.

=> Read more!

An Air Force investigation says an F-16 pilot failed "to positively identify the intended target" when he opened fire on a rental SUV occupied by two Fort Lewis soldiers last April at the Utah Test and Training Range.

The soldiers, from the post's 5th Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, narrowly avoided serious injury. One of the five 20mm rounds the pilot fired into the vehicle hit about a foot behind the driver's side door, said a spokeswoman at Hill Air Force Base.

The two soldiers from 5th Brigade's 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment suffered cuts and scrapes when they jumped out of the truck. Through a Fort Lewis spokesman they declined to be interviewed Wednesday.

The mishap occurred about 10:50 p.m. April 8 as soldiers from the 8-1 and Air Force joint terminal attack controllers, or JTACs, from Fort Lewis' 5th Air Support Operations Squadron trained with fighter pilots out of Hill.

Hill spokeswoman Lt. Beth Woodward identified the pilot only as a major with the 34th Fighter Squadron who was training for a May deployment to the Middle East. The squadron deployed on schedule but left the pilot at home, she said.

He had over 800 flying hours at the time of the mishap and was rated as current in his training and qualified to fly the mission.

The pilot was grounded during the investigation. As a result of the findings, he now must fly at the direction of a wingman and "additional classroom, simulator and flight training is required to ensure the individual is qualified for wing missions," the 388th Fighter Wing said in a news release announcing the results of the investigation.

The night of the accident, the pilot was flying one of two jets intending to strafe a mock armored vehicle on the Utah training range. The two Fort Lewis soldiers were in their SUV parked near an observation post a mile-and-a-half away.

JTACs on the ground and the pilot's wingman properly marked the correct target, and the soldiers in the SUV had properly marked their vehicle, Woodward said.

"The investigation team found it most likely that at some point in the pilot's turn (which began at a lower altitude than the pilot planned), after looking inside the cockpit to check his flight parameters, he mistook the set of lights at the Hornet Tower Observation Point as the laser mark provided by his wingman," she said. "In the end, he was trying to make the strafing pass work, and most likely was concentrating on his flight parameters more than the target area itself."

Press release is below:

=> Read more!

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Reps. Norm Dicks, Jay Inslee and Jim McDermott are going to visit the VA Hospital in Seattle on Friday morning. They're popping in at 9 a.m., touring the place at 9:45, and then doing a brief "media availability" at 10:15.

All of which amounts to less time than it would take a Tacoma-area vet to drive (or be driven) to Seattle, find a parking place and then sit in the waiting room for an appointment that he or she used to be able to get at American Lake.

None, maybe, to a letter carrier.

From Wikipedia:

Sleet may refer to:
* A mixture of snow and rain (particularly in countries where British English is spoken)
* Ice pellets (mainly within the United States and Canada)

And then:

Hail is a form of precipitation which consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice (hailstones). Hailstones on Earth usually consist mostly of water ice and measure between 5 and 50 millimeters in diameter, with the larger stones coming from severe thunderstorms.[1] Hail is only produced by cumulonimbi (thunderclouds), usually at the front of the storm system, and is composed of transparent ice or alternating layers of transparent and translucent ice at least 1 mm thick. Small hailstones are less than 5 mm in diameter, and are reported as SHGS. Unlike ice pellets, they are layered and can be irregular and clumped together.

Either way, it's the 21st of flippin' April, and I'm sick of this $*^#!

A pair of joint terminal attack controllers from Fort Lewis were lucky to escape with only minor injuries after an F-16 pilot lit up their rental SUV with 20mm cannon fire at the Utah Test and Training Range. Details here.

Follow up story here reports that the pilot, out of Hill Air Force Base, is restricted to non-flying duties while the Air Force investigates.

Story contains this gem: officials "aren't sure whether the soldiers had purchased the extra insurance on the SUV."

UPDATE: The Lewis guys were not JTACs per se, but members of the fire support team from the 8th Squadron, 1st Cavalry Regiment (part of the 5th Brigade Strykers). A Fort Lewis spokesman said they suffered cuts and scrapes from bailing out of the SUV, and one banged up his shoulder.

Danger Room has the awful news from the military's continuing struggle to come to terms with the new media, the digital habits of its service members and the opsec challenges posed therein.

Note to self: change URL.

The Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy reports today that the Army has changed its mind about blocking off public access to its unclassified library of doctrinal publications.

For some damn reason, the Army on Feb. 6 sealed its Reimer Digital Library behind a password-protected firewall. Nearly everything on the site is approved for public release, according to a Washington Post story today about the move.

The FAS followed today with a post that the Army's Training and Doctrine Command has decided to re-open the site rather than have to produce the thousands and thousands of previously publicly available documents to comply with the federation's FOIA request. Not only that, there were plenty of legit researcher people besides us nosy reporter types who were making regular use of the site but were locked out in the change.

FOIAing the Army can be an olympian test of patience, but this one would've been a slam dunk, we think.