Posted on 03/29/2025 1:28:27 PM PDT by McGruff
A specialized U.S. Navy dive team and a group of Polish engineers have joined the recovery operation for the four U.S. soldiers who went missing in Lithuania during a training exercise, officials said Saturday.
The new reinforcements will work to recover the armored vehicle M88A2 Hercules, which was found on Wednesday, March 26. The armored vehicle remains submerged under at least 15 feet of water, clay-like mud and silt, U.S. military officials said in a statement on Saturday.
"We are going to use every resource available from all our countries to find our missing soldiers," Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, 1st Armored Division commanding general, said in the statement.
Recovery efforts will focus on removing water and mud from the area, shore up the ground around the site to support heavy equipment, and prepare the site for dive operations, officials said.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Trying to ‘get cute’ with Russia...not a good idea.
More here:
PRESS RELEASE – Recovery Operations in Lithuania March 29 Update
They may find a few Tiger Tanks in that same swamp.
I think we can say with relative certainty that we now know what forces blew up Nordstream. Loose ends here being eliminated.
Maybe! Any vintage aircraft or vehicle they find would be a treasure!
Every time I go to Lithuania, I can feel the old dark gods looking at me from the forest. That bog is literally the perfect movie scene for the old dark gods looking at you from the forest. Lithuania is a proud, fierce, magically amazing dark place where it takes years to sync with the body language of the Lithuanians. Also, the last bar fight I got in was in Lithuania but it had nothing to do with the old dark gods in the forest.
Pump it. The bodies might be drawn towards the pump nozzle.
They seem very interested in a possible watery grave here. I can’t imagine it was death by accidental misadventure, not with 4 of them as victims, their age and presumed fitness/ awareness of surroundings and dangers? Does any of this show a plausible path for their continued absence and presumed death status?
People are reading WAY too much into this. An M88 is an armored recovery vehicle - it’s a tow truck for tanks. Rolling a track in marshy or wet terrain is frighteningly easy to do - I’ve done it myself. I was lucky that my Bradley didn’t roll completely.
3rd ID is based at Ft. Stewart, Georgia. They train in different places around the world for a bunch of reasons - it gives everyone the chance to train a rapid deployment under peacetime conditions instead of wartime, it’s good to go to different ranges than the ones you’re used to, etc. These training deployments are planned years in advance. This is a tragic training accident, nothing more.
When I was in, our company’s doctrine never allowed us to sleep buttoned up in, nor atop of, our IFV in the field. We had to leave the vehicle to find a spot to sleep.
Could a crew have bedded down inside of the recovery vehicle in the evening and have sunk beneath the ground without realizing by the morning?
I can imagine they had radio checks and they simply answered while inside without checking their surroundings. But then again, if they were alive and couldn’t open the hatch or see out the ports the next morning, would the antennae still be up and could the crew still communicate for help?
…But before all that, why would such a massive vehicle operate where such a massive vehicle could easily become bogged down?
Every time I go to Lithuania….
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I don’t share your assessment of Lithuania. When I went I saw a great tragedy, a vassal state of the EU, turning more liberal every day, the young leaving.
Looking at the historic population, today they have a population of 2.8 million, in 1939 they had 2.6 million. Those figures are appalling. 50,000 plus Lithuanians leave Lithuania a year, never to return. For years the US ran a Visa Lottery program enabling thousands a year to come to the US.
That said, a million plus Lithuanians simply “ disappeared “ during the wartime. Purges, emigration, deportation to Siberia, etc.
I would suspect a muddy slope with a pond at the bottom. The vehicle may have flipped over as well, pinning them inside.
Here's a picture of a tank stuck in the mud in nearby Poland. Add a mudslide into a pond and it could happen quick.
Here's a picture of a Russian tank right on the edge of a swamp.
That makes perfect sense to me. I can easily imagine that.
Train as you fight. In wartime an armored recovery vehicle will not always have the option of waiting for a dry sunny day. They have to be able to work in adverse conditions.
Absolutely!
T.B. Yoits explained how it could happen. Far more plausible and likely than what I had imagined.
operating heavy equipment in the field ... stuff gonna happen; but, losing soldiers in training is a bitch
more familiar with M578s than M88s
Because when I need someone to conduct undersea demolition, the crew of a US Army tank recovery vehicle is always my first and best choice.
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