U.S. Forces Hurry to Set Up Camp, Now Wait to Enter Kosovo

The operations of KFOR, the military force moving into Kosovo, kicked into high speed Thursday in a brawny flexing of NATO muscle.

U.S. troops of Task Force Falcon were at full throttle, more than tripling in number in a matter of hours. U.S. Camp Able Sentry here, a staging area for KFOR, or the Kosovo Force, went from housing 600 U.S. soldiers in the morning to more than 2,000 by day’s end, with several hundred more to come in the next few days.

Massive Chinook helicopters ferried Humvee vehicles, hanging from ropes, over the mountains from Albania. A dozen Apache attack helicopters, the kind used in the Persian Gulf War to knock out Iraqi tanks, descended.

A convoy of massive green tanks, each aboard its own commercial flatbed truck rented in Greece and still bearing the owner’s name and phone number, clogged the headquarters’ gate.

Roads were snarled with military vehicles carrying everything from cannons to makeshift pontoon bridges to be used to ford streams where bridges have been destroyed. Trucks bore distinctive orange fluorescent stickers on their hoods to prevent accidental bombing from friendly aircraft.

Hundreds of restless U.S. soldiers moved into the KFOR center after arriving by helicopter from their previous posting in Albania, or by boat and bus from Greece.

Altogether, the U.S. plans to contribute about 7,000 of the total multinational peacekeeping force of about 48,000 soldiers. But the U.S. has further to go than some of the larger NATO members in bringing its forces up to speed; others, such as Britain’s, have been in place longer and are much larger.

For all the talk of the operation being a peacekeeping force, the heavy artillery on display is the same that would be used for an invasion. In essence, the multinational troops are preparing for what amounts to an occupation of Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia, the main republic of Yugoslavia.

The peacekeepers’ goals, said British Lt. Gen. Mike Jackson, are threefold: To monitor, verify and enforce compliance; to assist relief organizations in bringing refugees home; and to provide a level of basic law and order that allows people to start rebuilding their lives.

“Soldiers waiting here . . . are extremely anxious to do their jobs,” Jackson said.

No one was happier to get things moving than U.S. Army Sgt. Philip Blaisdell, who arrived by helicopter from Tirana, the Albanian capital. His elite Ranger unit had been cooling its heels in Albania for the past several weeks.

“We guarded Apaches that didn’t fly,” he joked about his last assignment, just after he and 10 others dropped their massive backpacks onto the wooden floor of the tent they’ll be sharing until the move into Kosovo.

The tent looked like paradise compared with their quarters back in Albania, where it took weeks to get tents set up along with running water and sanitation.

Blaisdell said it wasn’t clear what the Rangers would be doing, but that his “worst nightmare was being assigned to keeping law and order,” which he said was the job of military police.

U.S. Army soldiers who flew in from Albania were followed by Marines from a contingent that had been at sea for two months before landing in Greece and moving to Macedonia, where they will also be housed in tents.