Brawn in Afghanistan, Brainpower in Florida

Military code requires junior officers to hold a salute until it’s returned by the brass. But here at the U.S. Central Command, temporary home to 240 soldiers who descended on Tampa from 21 coalition nations to direct the war in Afghanistan, you salute second at your own risk.

Discerning who outranks whom is a daunting task at “CentCom,” where a baffling array of camouflage togs, variously colored berets and sundry insignia mark the strategic locus of the Afghan war. French Lt. Gen. John-Paul Raffene’s plum-colored beret bears four stars, but he describes himself as the equivalent of an American three-star. Confounded, even senior soldiers have adopted a hair-trigger salute.

“It’s hard to keep them all straight,” said Col. Michael S. Coman, deputy commander of the 6th Air Mobility Wing at MacDill Air Force Base, which serves as host to the Central Command. “We just pop a salute when we see ‘em. You can never go wrong extending that kind of a courtesy.”

Welcome to Coalition Village, a makeshift military version of the United Nations where nearly two dozen new flags flutter above no-frills tan-and-brown trailers in what was once CentCom’s main parking lot. Looming highest, above an American trailer designated for coordination with coalition members, is the American flag.

Beneath Old Glory, within the trailers tinted yellow by fluorescent lights, echo the cadences of more than a dozen tongues and at least three varieties of English. CentCom officials, who declined to acknowledge the existence of the guest soldiers until the war was a month old, won’t say who has how many troops here out of concern for the political sensitivities of some allies. But the residents include officials from Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Jordan, the Netherlands and Qatar. A Russian colonel, who declined to give his name, described his visit as a kind of test case.

The coalition villagers represent fewer than half of the more than 50 nations helping the U.S. armed forces with military aid, intelligence, investigative help and access to bases. They have descended on Florida not just to watch and confer, but to take a direct role in the operation, from directing British special forces in the field to granting clearance for coalition fighter jets to fly though foreign airspace.

Although many wear light uniforms designed to blend into the sands of Mideast and Central Asian nations, like the distinctive desert camouflage worn by soldiers under the Central Command, few find it odd to be guiding a war in Afghanistan from Tampa.

Although the Central Command is responsible for all U.S. military operations in Southwest Asia, parts of the Middle East and the Horn of Africa, the Pentagon has never found a politically palatable site to host it in a region where many nations must balance their ties to the United States with their distaste for its pro-Israeli policies. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, CentCom’s most flamboyant chief, moved temporarily to Saudi Arabia to direct the Persian Gulf War.

“Now with the modern means of communication, where we have access instantly to information, it is not necessary to stand in a tent in the middle of the desert or on top of the mountains in the middle of Afghanistan in order to command and direct the war,” said Raffene, who heads the French delegation here.

Many villagers have a personal connection to this wounded nation. British Air Marshal G.E. Stirrup, who lived for three years in Texas, had just returned from his 25th wedding anniversary in New York one week before the attacks. Raffene, the French general who has spent time in Washington and Kansas, was reminded of the Americans lost in the liberation of France from the occupation of Nazi Germany.

“We have still in mind what we owe to you from when our freedom was threatened during World War II,” Raffene said.

For Canadian Commodore Jean-Pierre Thiffault, who brought a delegation of 50, second only to the 60 visitors from Britain, the call to war came from a neighbor in need.

“It’s taken me pretty much a long time to get over what happened,” said Thiffault, who counted more flags bearing the stars and stripes than the maple leaf when 100,000 Canadians joined in a memorial for American victims of the attacks at the Canadian Parliament.

Canadians responded by sending four ships to the Arabian Sea, with a fifth en route and a sixth slated for the eastern Mediterranean. A Canadian Polaris airbus has carried 750,000 pounds of freight and an untold number of passengers from Germany to Central Asia in support of the campaign.

As targets themselves, many of the military pilgrims to MacDill understood the shock of Americans who felt a sudden loss of security Sept. 11.

“Unfortunately, we in France have a terrible experience with that,” Raffene said. “We have suffered until recently terrorist attacks in Paris, downtown.”

The coalition members start their days early, rounding up intelligence, field reports and potential offerings in the war effort before a 9 a.m. briefing with Gen. Tommy Franks, CentCom’s commander in chief, or CINC, in military parlance.

For about 40 minutes, Franks leads an update of the range of ongoing operations and the latest intelligence on significant conflicts, intelligence reports on enemy casualties, rumors on the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and--most importantly to coalition members--what the United States needs to prosecute the war.

Then begins 10 minutes of what one coalition member describes as “very animated” input by staffers sitting in the six rows of terraced seats and coalition members at the semicircular table at which Franks presides in the center. No one is unclear about who’s in charge.

“There’s no mistake about it. The United States is the lead nation. That’s quite clear in our minds. . . . When the time is right the CINC does call and say, ‘Canada, can you do this?’ ”

Even overfly rights don’t always come easily. The pace of the war doesn’t always allow the pilots who fly top military officials the two weeks lead time they like to plan trips.

“I’ve had to hold outside of a country’s airspace for clearance because it wasn’t granted yet,” said Maj. Jeff Schollmeyer, one of the pilots who ferries top-ranking officials in C-37 Gulfstream jets and larger KC-135s. “We work it out while we’re watching the fuel gauge.”

Like many military bases, MacDill is a city unto itself, with a department store, hotel, bowling alley, movie theater, fire station and restaurants. But it is also unique. Perched on a peninsula overlooking downtown Tampa, the Air Force population of 3,000 is dwarfed in size by the more than 50 other organizations it hosts on the base, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s hurricane watch unit and two major national military headquarters, the Special Operations Command and CentCom.

Together, they bring the base population up to 7,000. The wartime influx of National Guard and foreign military troops, most of whom leave the base at night for Tampa hotels, has lifted that to 9,000.

Cars now idle for 40 minutes at 7 a.m. along the last few blocks of Dale Mabry Parkway, which ends at MacDill’s main gate, as soldiers enforce a posted “100% ID check.” Inside, a newly laid row of cement Jersey barriers is designed to block would-be terrorists from rolling an explosive-laden truck into the CentCom building.

In winter, as many as 700 retirees and their families from all four armed services come here to take advantage of privileges of membership. They come in their Winnebagos to golf on the base course and drape red Christmas ribbons and green bunting over deck chairs in two campgrounds a short walk from a pristine beachfront marina overlooking the Tampa skyline. The MacDill sun tans the lined skin of the aging soldiers and their families. Civilians must crowd one another along hotel-lined public beaches across the bay.

James E. Kutzer, a recently retired Army Command sergeant major and father of an Army captain stationed at Ft. Knox, Ky., recently rolled his RV across the rapidly freezing ground of Michigan to vacation here.

“I knew when,” Kutzer said, choking up, “when those terrorists hit that building, they were going to pay their dues for it. We’re gonna get ‘em. I have every confidence in the world.”

Glancing at the varied camouflage uniforms of the coalition, he noted that the United States often performed best alongside its allies.

“It’s a wonderful thing,” Kutzer said. ‘We could do it without them, but I think it’s better with them.”

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Times staff writer John Hendren was recently on assignment in Tampa.