March 6, 1998
American and Kenyan military and civilian personnel do their best to distribute relief supplies and food to the flood-affected areas but over 350,000 Kenyans starve before food can reach them.
Unofficially,
Troops of the 36th Engineer Group (Construction) restore power from the first of six hydropower plants between Knoxville and Chattanooga. (The colonel in command of the group had incurred the wrath of the Tennessee Valley Authority in early November when he took the plants offline and shielded their transformers underground). On the other side of the nation, troops of the 115th Engineer Group are forced to abandon their attempt to restore the control system of the Grand Coulee Dam, America's largest hydropower plant, as it becomes apparent that the system has been irreparably damaged by the Soviet high-altitude EMP during the Thanksgiving Day Massacre and that there is no way American industry can produce a new system.
The commander of the 28th Infantry Division (Pennsylvania National Guard) makes the difficult call about which subordinate units to deactivate. He makes his judgements on a variety of factors - seniority and combat history (recent and historical) of various battalions, their condition and current strength, the likelihood of receiving replacement troops and equipment (high for some sort of replacements for infantry battalions, low for the armor and artillery battalions) and the strength of their surviving command staff. Each of the division's brigades deactivates one battalion, and the divisional support command and other divisional units (Air Defense Artillery and Military Intelligence battalions and MP and Chemical companies) deactivate one third of their force, on average.
The nuclear-powered cruiser USS Virginia arrives off Freeport, Bahamas as it searches for Soviet raiders rumored to be sheltering in the region.
The Italian corvette Sfinge departs Bizerte, Tunisia; US Naval Intelligence agents note its departure but are unable to track it once it disappears over the horizon.
In Brownsville, Texas, BMSA (Boatswains Mate Apprentice) Rodney Cutler, assigned to a refugee camp that is overflowing with refugees from both sides of the nearby border with Mexico, is caught taking liberties with an underage female, offering her food from his slim rations. The girl's father is enraged when he catches the startled sailor, and the panicked Cutler shoots the father with his assigned Ruger P-85 pistol. The gunshot and subsequent hubbub draws an increasingly large crowd and Cutler loudly exclaims that he was ambushed by the family, who wanted to steal his food and weapon. The situation continues to escalate, not helped by the lack of Spanish-speakers in Cutler's command staff, and soon the camp's naval detachment is facing a full-scale riot. Cutler is badly beaten but manages to extract himself, and the camp is locked down as the naval guard force deploys lethal force. 48 refugees are killed in the gunfire and over a dozen other sailors are hurt,
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I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for 12 hours. When it was all over, I walked up. We didn't find one of 'em, not one stinkin' body. The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like... victory. Someday this war's gonna end...
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