Great web page!! But have alot of questions, but will make it simple.

My father in law, now deceased. Was in the Army Engineers. Hard unit to find, because according to the address\'s that I have, his unit was separate. I don\'t have any paper work as of yet, such as his DD-214, or discharge papers. Hoping you can help me find more info on:

1. \"HQ\" \"CO. C\" 386th Eng. Bn.(Sep) 1943 -1945.

2. \"HQ\" \"Co. C\" 386th Eng. BN(Sep) 5th Army Base Section Nov. 1943.

3. \"HQ\" 3rd BN 98th Gen. Service Reg. the latter part of 1945. Both APO\'s 782-(Algeria, Italy,Morocco. )

He was stationed in Ft. Barkley TX, and became an officer at Fort Belvoir (1942) then was most likely in Fort Kilmer where the 386th Engineer(Formed @ Fort Knox, KY.) was staged.

Tough unit to find information on. I appreciate your time on these units. I am researching and putting together the history along with the WW Two letters that I have for the family.

Sincerely, Debra Johnson

==========================

This is what I found so far, not much but a start. I will keep looking.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/age...army/386eng.htm

Here is a post on our site that shows the 386th were in Italy

http://208.109.212.45/forum/index.php?show...85&hl=386th

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=48119

Coalition Forces Detain Dozens in Iraq Operations

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Nov. 11, 2007 – Coalition forces detained 16 suspects, including three wanted individuals, during operations today to disrupt al Qaeda in Iraq and foreign terrorist operations in central and northern Iraq.

-- During an operation in southern Baghdad, coalition forces captured a wanted individual believed to be involved in the car-bombing network in the Rusafa and Karkh areas. Reports indicated the suspect was associated with several of the network’s senior leaders and allegedly tried to reestablish operations after significant degradation by coalition forces.

-- An operation northeast of the capital city netted an individual believed to be tied to foreign-terrorist facilitators and other senior al Qaeda leaders operating in Salman Pak. Coalition forces entered the target area and called for a building’s occupants to come out. They complied without incident. The suspect identified himself to the ground forces and was detained.

-- Farther north in Mosul, coalition forces captured another wanted individual believed to be involved in the city’s terrorist propaganda network. The ground force isolated the target building and called for the building’s occupants to come out. During the operation, coalition forces found significant al Qaeda propaganda believed to be for distribution as part of the media network. The wanted individual identified himself to the ground forces and was detained.

-- In three separate operations near Salman Pak, Beiji and Mosul, coalition forces detained eight suspects while targeting alleged foreign-terrorist facilitators, couriers, associates of senior level al Qaeda members, and planners of improvised-explosive-device attacks against the Iraqi people.

“These captures are another step forward in disrupting al-Qaeda networks,†said Army Maj. Winfield Danielson, a Multinational Force Iraq spokesman.

In raids yesterday, coalition forces detained 10 suspects during operations to disrupt al Qaeda in Iraq in central and northern Iraq.

Coalition forces captured a wanted individual during operations northeast of Baghdad targeting an alleged al Qaeda in Iraq financier. Reports indicated the wanted individual was an associate of senior terrorist leaders in the region, and his sons were believed to be snipers for the terrorist network. Upon entering the target area, coalition forces called for a building’s occupants to come out, and the occupants complied without incident. The ground force found multiple weapons and detained five other suspects on site.

Meanwhile, south of Mosul, coalition forces captured a wanted individual believed to be a military commander familiar with improvised-explosive-device attacks and an associate of senior al Qaeda leaders in the area.

In other operations in the Beiji area, coalition forces detained two suspects while targeting foreign-terrorist facilitators, media networks and al Qaeda leaders responsible for improvised-explosive-device attacks in the region. “We are continuing to take the fight to the enemy,†Danielson said. “Iraqi and coalition forces are diminishing al Qaeda’s ability to attack the Iraqi people.â€

Elsewhere in Iraq yesterday, soldiers with 2nd Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, joined with Iraqi National Police officers in recovering a cache in eastern Baghdad. The find, made by soldiers of Company C, 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, and officers of 1st Battalion, 4th Brigade, 1stIraqi National Police Division, consisted of two mines and eight magazines, along with one radio. This was the sixth time in three weeks that Iraqi security forces had recovered a cache in eastern Baghdad.

In earlier operations:

-- Baghdad soldiers seized two suspected extremists and uncovered two caches during ongoing operations in the Rashid district of the Iraqi capital Nov. 9. "Warriors" from Company C, 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division, attached to 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, detained two men suspected of terrorist activities and identified by Iraqi security volunteers. The suspects are being held for further questioning.

-- Soldiers of Company D., 2nd Battalion, 12th Infantry, found a weapons cache Nov. 9 in the Jazair neighborhood. The cache consisted of a rocket-propelled-grenade launcher, a PKC machine gun with two barrels, three RPG rounds and eight RPG boosters, a 60 mm mortar tube and two rounds, a bolt-action rifle, an AK-47 with 19 full magazines, four hand grenades, a suicide vest, three sets of body armor, about 3,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, and 22 ski masks.

-- The "Black Lions" of Company C, 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment, attached to Task Force 1-18, part of the 4th Interim Brigade Combat Team. Soldiers found eight mortar rounds of various sizes, four RPG rounds, two rocket fuses, five radios, and a set of body armor. Both caches were taken to a coalition base for disposal.

–- Iraqi police conducted a combined operation with coalition forces against al Qaeda in Iraq west of Samarra on Nov. 9. During the operation, seven insurgents were killed, four were detained, and a weapons cache was secured.

–- Soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 502nd Airborne, found a large cache during a combat patrol in Haswa on Nov. 9. The soldiers discovered the cache while setting up a cordon. They found a building containing 22 blocks of C4, one improvised Claymore mine, one propane tank of accelerant, and one 125 mm mortar round. Upon finding the cache, located near an area mosque, the soldiers called in an explosive ordnance disposal team to destroy the cache. All munitions found were destroyed in place.

(Compiled from Multinational Force Iraq and Multinational Corps Iraq news releases.)

Related Sites:

Multinational Corps Iraq

Multinational Force Iraq

Dear friends:

Seems like at least once or twice a year I have to send out the friendly reminder for email rules and etiquette, so I thought I'd paste it here. For all of you who are already doing your part to make the internet a nicer place, kindly dismiss this or send it on to a friend or family member who needs a little guidance!

========================================

Number one on the list...PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD the email as is. I mean NEVER! When I receive email that has a million forwarded addresses in it, etc., it immediately goes to the trash can. If I have to scroll down through 100 email addresses and everyone's comments, I simply won't do it. I don't have the time and heck, it's way too aggravating! If you must forward an email do one of two things first:

The copy and paste method:

ONLY copy the vital part of the email (text and photos) that you want people to read, and paste it into a new email. Now send that. This way everyone gets a fresh copy without all the other garbage.

or

Click on forward, but BEFORE you send it, please delete all the extraneous garbage from the email, and only keep the text and photos.

=====================================

Number two...

PLEASE DO NOT, NEVER, NEVER, NEVER, SEND OR FORWARD AN EMAIL BEFORE YOU VERIFY WHETHER IT IS TRUE. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!!!!

I HAVE PLACED THIS ADVICE ON ALL MY SITES, AND HAVE EVEN INCLUDED THIS ADVICE IN TWO OF MY NEWSLETTERS, BUT DANGED...

SENDING AN EMAIL ON BEFORE VERIFYING IS THE SAME THING AS GOSSIPING. REST ASSURED OF THIS. IT CREATES HAVOC ON THE INTERNET, FLOODS EMAIL INBOXES, AND TAKES UP VALUABLE TIME.

HERE ARE THE SITES YOU SHOULD CHECK OUT BEFORE FOREWARDING ANY EMAIL. DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING YOU READ BECAUSE 3/4'S OF IT FLOATING AROUND THE INTERNET IS FABRICATED OR DOCTORED.

BE AN ACTIVE INDIVIDUAL AND HELP BY MAKING SURE ONLY THE TRUTH GETS SPREAD. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COOPERATION.

Here are sources you can check for hoaxes and threats:

http://www.symantec.com/business/security_...isks/hoaxes.jsp

http://www.snopes.com/

http://www.f-secure.com/virus-info/hoax/

http://www.sophos.com/security/hoaxes/

http://vil.mcafee.com/hoax.asp

http://www.hoax-slayer.com/latest-information.html

Now if anyone sends me one more forwarded email before checking your sources.

==========================================

Number three... Always make sure you have a title in the subject area. Many email programs and servers will automatically bounce an email if it doesn't have a subject. This is done to thwart spammers.

==========================================

Thanks for your cooperation, now forward this to everyone you know. LOL!!! Wait a minute... Before you do that, re-read the above email!

Hu there,

If you know anyone who is a knitter, the WWII Museum is collecting knit scarves for our vets. Here is an article that tells where to send them and also is a nice story about how one woman got closer to the experience of the war through her knitting a scarf.

http://cache.lionbrand.com/cgi-bin/lionbra...splayType=story

There are lots of charity knit programs for veterans and active service folks. If you'd like to find one, send me an email and I'll send you some links.

Darlene

Hi folks! Just returned from our weekend trip to Lexington and Port Huron, MI to see a friend's Band, Redhill. My husband handed me the latest edition of the Wall Street Journal and said, here's another article on "your guys"!

HOW'S YOUR DRINK?

Here's to GI Ingenuity

By ERIC FELTEN

November 10, 2007; Page W7

"Of all the world's armies, the American army gets the best equipment," wrote GI cartoonist Bill Mauldin in 1945. "But we missed the boat on one thing. Every other army gets a liquor ration."

Mauldin was part of the otherwise well-equipped amphibious landing on the Italian coast at Anzio in January 1944. The assault caught the Germans by surprise, and the troops might well have charged deep into the Italian countryside. But the timid general in charge hunkered down on the beachhead instead, much to Winston Churchill's dismay: "I had hoped that we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we had got was a stranded whale."

KICKAPOO JOY JUICE

1½ oz grappa

3 oz grapefruit juice

Combine with ice in a tumbler.Pinned down along a broad stretch of coast for months, the American troops "were fixing up their own distilleries with barrels of dug-up vino, gasoline cans, and copper tubing from wrecked airplanes," Mauldin recalled in his memoir "Up Front." The result was a rough approximation of grappa. "The doggies called it 'Kickapoo Joy Juice,' " named after the fierce moonshine in the "Li'l Abner" comic. "It wasn't bad stuff when you cut it with canned grapefruit juice."

The grappa-grapefruit combination is not something I would have come up with on my own. But if you use some decent, professionally made grappa, the drink is downright tasty and a good way to toast America's veterans this weekend.

Mauldin immortalized the soldiers' effort in some cartoons, one showing a crew of scruffy dogfaces excavating a vast barrel of chianti that had been buried to hide it from the Germans. The barrel had been found with what the soldier in the frame calls the "Best little mine-detector ever made." Another shows a G.I. hard at work feeding chianti into a Rube Goldberg still.

As Paul Fussell notes in "Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War," troops "were so eager for drink that numbers of them consumed captured buzz-bomb fluid (i.e., methyl alcohol) and died." The problem of dubious alcohol substitutes was so acute that from October 1944 to June 1945, according to the Army's history of World War II medicine, "there were more deaths in the European theater due to a single agent, alcohol poisoning, than to acute communicable disease."

Even so, it would be a mistake to think that a taste for something to drink in the field is indicative of deficient soldiering. Stephen Ambrose recalled being at the 1999 Medal of Honor Society Convention, where the subject of Mauldin's cartoons came up. One recipient of that award offered that his favorite featured "Willie and Joe" expressing their horror at finding a winery wrecked by fleeing German troops -- or, as Mauldin had put it, "Them atrocity commitin' skunks . . . " The boisterous laughter in the room demonstrated that plenty of other Medal of Honor recipients shared the sentiment.

Given the danger of ersatz liquor, one of Kickapoo Joy Juice's main virtues was that it was "less corrosive than the bootleg stuff the Italian civilians offered," Mauldin wrote. "The local rotgut made many who drank it 'crazy' drunk, not 'respectable' drunk." Far better, thought Mauldin, would have been a military that provided its soldiers with a reasonable amount of decent alcohol. "Drinking, like sex, is not a question of should or shouldn't in the army. It's here to stay," he said.

In the same camp is Mr. Fussell, whose writings are informed by his own combat service in Normandy. He says that along with "plenty of badges and medals," other essentials for soldiers' morale have always been "ample access to alcohol and, when possible, non-infectious sexual intercourse."

The 1943 tract "Psychology for the Fighting Man," by Harvard Prof. E.G. Boring, noted that the Army allowed "men to drink at their own discretion so long as they do not disgrace themselves or the uniform" -- because the brass recognized that "to the man who is used to drink in moderation, a drink once and a while is a great comfort and pleasure. And the man who is on combat duty earns whatever relief and pleasure he can find."

What a difference some 60 years make. The troops now in Iraq and Afghanistan have found those desert postings to be particularly dry. So as not to offend Muslim sensibilities, these men and women are prohibited under the Pentagon's General Order No. 1 from possessing or consuming alcohol of any sort. There is plenty of nonalcoholic beer, and I'm told that the occasional full-test brew is enjoyed when in the company of European troops not under the same restrictions. (In Afghanistan, Army slang for beer is "Dutch MRE.") But NCOs regularly sort through the care packages their soldiers receive from home, checking to make sure that bottles of Scope actually contain mouthwash. If Mauldin were around today, no doubt he'd draw a few panels with Willie and Joan in Iraq, griping about the paucity of liquid refreshment.

This isn't an argument that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan should be lavished with liquor. Morale seems to have survived better than Mauldin or Fussell would have anticipated, and sobriety does have its operational benefits. "Alcohol makes a soldier less accurate in his aim," temperance advocate Ferdinand Iglehart wrote in 1917. He had a point. Even so, Americans now fighting abroad are largely forgoing that "comfort and pleasure" long thought an essential part of morale. It is but one of many sacrifices they are making on our behalf, and worth remembering when we raise a glass in their honor.

• Email me at eric.felten@wsj.com.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1194641508...rnal_primary_hs