Yet, Donald Trump's campaign to "purify" white America's blood is targeting Hispanics, Latinos and every other people of color.
His administration considers non-whites who join the army or go to university or take federal jobs to be DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hires - people who are not qualified but who get hired because of the color of their skin. Same thing with women: In Trump's world they belong in the kitchen and should be making babies; those who rise through the ranks of the army, universities, corporations, etc. are unworthy, unqualified DEI hires.
Trump in fact never hid his deep hatred of army personnel and soldiers. He deems anyone who puts his/her life at risk for their country are "suckers and losers". He just doesn't understand the notion of sacrifice for a higher cause; he himself is a draft dodger who wouldn't waste his time and risk his life fighting in Vietnam. His wealthy father's connections gave Donny a waiver from serving because of mysterious bone spurs that normally affect elderly people, not 20 years old.
Trump's DOGE terrorist group goes around dismantling, among other federal agencies, the VA Administration and abandoning care for the hundreds of thousands of veteran soldiers. Trump's administration is erasing, banning, deleting anything that celebrates women, people of color and other minorities who served their country for fear they cast a shadow over white men who ought to remain the dominant group in this country, even as the country's demographics are slowly but inexorably creeping to make white anglo-saxon protestants a minority by 2050, still the largest minority to be sure, but a minority nonetheless.
As he wages war on non-whites in this country, deporting anyone that "looks" Arab or Hispanic or even German or British, the death of four US soliders training in Lithuania has exposed the facts that Trump prefers to keep under lid: They are all Hispanics.
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Last US soldier found dead after Lithuania training accident. 3 others identified
LOLITA C. BALDOR
Updated Wed, April 2, 2025
Lithuania Missing Soliders. This combination of images shows from left, Army Pfc. Dante D. Tatiana, 21, of Dededo, Guam, Sgt. Edwin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, Calif., and Sgt. Jose Duenez, 25, of Joliet, Ill., three of the four soldiers who were killed in a training accident near Pabradė, Lithuania, in March 2025. (Department of Defense via AP)
WASHINGTON (AP) — The final U.S. soldier who went missing in Lithuania has been found dead, bringing to an end a massive weeklong search for the four service members whose armored vehicle was pulled from a swampy training area, the U.S. military said Tuesday.
The bodies of the three other soldiers were recovered Monday after U.S., Polish and Lithuanian armed forces and authorities dug the M88 Hercules vehicle out of a peat bog at the expansive Gen. Silvestras Žukauskas training ground in the town of Pabradė.
The Army released the identities of the three soldiers recovered Monday, but the fourth soldier's name has not been made public as family notifications continue. They were Sgt. Jose Duenez Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois; Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California; and Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam.
The soldiers, part of the 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, were on a tactical training exercise when they and their vehicle were reported missing a week ago, the Army said.
“This past week has been devastating. Today our hearts bear the weight of an unbearable pain with the loss of our final Dogface Soldier,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, 3rd Infantry Division commander, said in a statement Tuesday. “Though we have received some closure, the world is darker without them.”
Hundreds of Lithuanian and U.S. soldiers and rescuers took part in the search through the thick forests and swampy terrain around Pabradė, 6 miles (10 kilometers) west of the border with Belarus. The 63-ton (126,000-pound) armored vehicle was discovered March 26 submerged in 15 feet (4.5 meters) of water, but it took days to pull it out of the bog.
Lithuanian armed forces provided military helicopters, fixed-wing aircraft, unmanned aerial systems and search and rescue personnel. They brought in additional excavators, sluice and slurry pumps, other heavy construction equipment, technical experts and several hundred tons of gravel and earth to help the recovery.
Navy divers maneuvered through thick layers of mud, clay and sediment with zero visibility to reach the vehicle Sunday evening and attach steel cables so it could be pulled out. When just three of the four bodies were found, the divers began a search of the bog area for the fourth.
Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, expressed gratitude to the U.S. allies who sent troops and equipment to help in the search and recovery.
“I can’t say enough about the support our Lithuanian Allies have provided us. We have leaned on them, and they, alongside our Polish and Estonian Allies — and our own Sailors, Airmen and experts from the Corps of Engineers — have enabled us to find and bring home our Soldiers," Donahue said in the statement. "This is a tragic event, but it reinforces what it means to have Allies and friends.”
According to the 3rd Infantry Division, Duenez was an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer and had served more than seven years in the Army. He deployed to Poland in 2021 and Germany in 2022, and he was currently serving in the 5th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment.
“Sgt. Jose Duenez will always hold a special place in our hearts. As both a leader and a soldier, he set an example every day — always the first to arrive and the last to leave, greeting every challenge with a smile and a readiness to support anyone who required assistance,” said Capt. Madyson K. Wellens, a commander in his squadron.
Franco was also an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer who had been in the Army for more than six years. He deployed to Korea in 2020 and Germany in 2022.
Wellens said Franco's “infectious smile and genuine joy in being with his team were matched only by the tenacity and drive. He never asked more of his soldiers than he was willing to give himself — a true testament to his character."
Taitano was also an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer. He had been in the Army for nearly two years, and this was his first deployment.
Cpt. Matthew Lund, another 5th Squadron commander, said "Taitano will always be remembered as the spark of the team. He wore a smile on his face no matter the environment or task and constantly brought the team together with his charisma and laughter.”
Approximately 3,500 soldiers from the brigade deployed in January to locations across Poland and the Baltic states for a nine-month rotation as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which supports NATO allies and partners following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“This loss is simply devastating,” said Norrie, the 3rd Infantry Division commander. “We are wrapping our arms around the families and loved ones of our Soldiers" during this difficult time.
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Opinion
A tragedy and a scandal reveal Trump's low regard for the lives of soldiers
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Tue, April 1, 2025
It is one of the tragic truths of military life that oftentimes a soldier has to die before anyone notices where the soldiers are and what they’re doing there. This was the case last week in Lithuania when four soldiers from the First Armored Brigade of the Third Infantry Division went missing after their M88 armored recovery vehicle disappeared in what is described as a peat bog during a training exercise near the border with Belarus, a close ally of Russia.
The bodies of three of the four soldiers were recovered Monday after a week-long effort to pull the M88 from the swampy bog. The army has not announced their names, and efforts continue to find the body of the fourth soldier who remains missing. President Trump was asked during a press availability at the White House last week if he had been briefed on the disappearance of the soldiers in Lithuania. He replied that he had not, and the questioning from reporters moved on to other topics.
This is sadly typical of what happens when soldiers are lost in training accidents, which happen all the time. When soldiers aren't at war, they are training, and much of what they do is dangerous. The M88 is what amounts to a 140,000-pound armored tow truck, equipped to pull other armored vehicles such as M1A1 tanks and Bradley armored personnel carriers that have either broken down or somehow gotten stuck in mud or snow or in a ditch. The army hasn't announced what the mission was that the soldiers were on, other than to say they had been sent out to recover another vehicle that had broken down. It isn't clear yet what happened to send the M88 into the peat bog, but it is suspected that the vehicle was moving down a road and somehow slipped into the swampy waters of the bog. If I were to guess, I'd say the M88 was probably lost at night when visibility was poor, and the road through a dense forest was unmarked.
The thing about armored vehicles is that, protected by their thick armor, you feel safe until something goes wrong. Then, as apparently happened with the incident in Lithuania, when the vehicle gets trapped and sinks into the bog, the crew is unable to escape.
Here is what may have happened. The M88 and its crew were being held in reserve and were sent out on the recovery mission when news came in over the radio that another vehicle was in trouble. Using a powerful winch, the M88 recovery vehicle can pull something that weighs up to 140,000 pounds out of trouble or lift a vehicle weighing up to 35,000 pounds using its crane-like boom. The M88 typically has a crew of three: a vehicle commander, a driver and a third soldier to assist in extractions. The three bodies that were recovered were found inside the vehicle. It is not known what happened to the fourth body, but he was probably the vehicle commander and was standing in the commander’s cupola at the time the M88 slipped off the road into the bog and was able to jump free, only to get sucked into the bog along with the M88.
I don't know how long the Third Infantry Division has been in Lithuania, but I do know what they're doing over there. They are deterring Vladimir Putin from any thought he has that he and his puppet president of Belarus might decide to roll over the Baltic states and Poland when Russia gets through with Ukraine, as unlikely as any of that might seem at this point in the three-year war Ukraine has fought for its survival.
Soldiers go where they are ordered to go. They don’t have a voice in the politics of their mission or in the rationale behind it. As we learned recently from the exchange of views among Trump's national security team on the Signal app as they planned the attack on Yemen, there is little love among people like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth for our European allies who find themselves on the front lines of what is rapidly becoming a new Cold War between the civilized world and Russia. Trump has made noises about pulling our military forces completely out of Europe and letting NATO and European Union states go it alone when it comes to defending themselves against any Russian aggression that might lie in their future.
But for right now, there are American soldiers and members of the Air Force stationed on European soil, with sailors in harm's way offshore in the Baltic, North and Red Seas. They didn't ask to be sent over there. They were ordered. Naval vessels and their sailors are being fired upon daily by Houthi rebels in Yemen. And though the soldiers of the Third Infantry Division are not engaged in combat in Lithuania, the job they are doing is not without danger, as we learned last week with the deaths of four soldiers.
Training accidents are a fact of life in the military. In the first Gulf War, more soldiers were killed or wounded in training accidents during the run-up to the war when they were in Saudi Arabia than were killed when they crossed the border into Kuwait and engaged the Iraqi army. Nearly everything soldiers do is dangerous. They carry deadly weapons. They shoot them in training. They ride around in heavy armored vehicles like tanks and armored personnel carriers and MRAP mine-resistant armored vehicles. If one of those things runs over you, you're dead. They are sometimes transported in combat helicopters like the Blackhawk, which have been involved in aerial accidents with each other and with ground obstacles. The Blackhawk that went down recently near Washington D.C. when it collided with a commercial airliner was operating in a training exercise.
Just as soldiers are killed in wars, they can also die in training for war.
We sit over here in our homes in the United States ordering pizza and watching Netflix and putting the kids to bed and getting ready to go to work in the morning, and overseas, soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines are in harm's way just by the jobs that they do. We have some 140 military outposts around the world. People wearing uniforms are stationed in every one of them. We don't know who they are or where they are or what they're doing until they make the news, and the way they usually make the news is by being injured or killed either in training or engaged with an enemy we don't even know about.
The loss of four soldiers from the Third Infantry Division is a tragedy. That the president of the United States had not even heard about it a day after it happened is sadly typical, especially of this president, who has repeatedly expressed his disdain for members of the military under his command.
Trump's national security team cared so little about the pilots they sent into combat against the Houthis that they used the insecure civilian Signal app to plan the mission. And now we have learned that four soldiers lost their lives defending European nations that neither Trump nor his vice president nor his secretary of defense care about. It is both a tragedy and a scandal.
Sadly, soldiers are learning that not even the loss of their lives has stirred the hollow souls of Donald Trump and his men.
