bobdina
07-06-2009, 11:34 AM
Fake nation tests tomorrow’s Special Forces
By Kevin Maurer - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Jul 6, 2009 6:30:23 EDT
RAMSEUR, N.C. — With cigarette-stained fingers, he reaches into the right back pocket of his jeans and fishes out a worn black leather wallet. Inside are a North Carolina driver’s license and some creased greenbacks bearing the face of George Washington.
Now: the other pocket. The wallet is identical, but its contents are like nothing you’ve ever seen. The ID card is recognized nowhere in the world. The work permit is for a job he doesn’t hold. The wad of cash is bright yellow and, in the United States, utterly worthless.
He is tall, aging, with a long gray beard that would make a Civil War general proud. His name? That depends. Such is life in Pineland, a country — well, a “country,” really — where who you are depends on which wallet you choose.
Pineland is a contradiction that exists for the best of causes. It is a real place that does not exist, or, perhaps, a fake place that does. It is a military training ground etched onto the landscape itself — a community with a backstory hewn from whole cloth that helps real American soldiers stay alive in real American wars. And much like the country that contains it, Pineland is a society founded upon an idea — that freedom and a fire to fight for it are more than slogans.
That is what Pineland means. This is what Pineland is:
• A fictional country created five decades ago, made up of 16 counties in central North Carolina and populated by regular Americans who, eight times a year, spend a chunk of their lives participating in a sprawling role-playing exercise.
• The setting for Robin Sage, the Special Forces final exam. In it, students from nearby Fort Bragg parachute and helicopter into Pineland at the end of almost a year of training, organize a guerrilla force and overthrow an oppressive regime on the eve of an American invasion.
• An exercise that borrows liberally from actual American missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia.
Bob Snyder — or the guy in his other wallet, known as “Pineland Bob” — is one of many who populate this “place” in exchange for nothing more than the reimbursement of their fuel expenses. He does it because he can, and because he needs to. “Maybe,” he says, “something I will do will save somebody’s life.”
Patriotism takes many forms — a flag waving on your house, a lapel pin. For Snyder and his compatriots, it means dressing like guerrillas and helping the Army’s elite forces. And exciting as it may be, it isn’t entertainment. It is, for them, as patriotic as saluting the flag.
Getting ready
Pineland Bob guides his truck down a dirt track, past a white farmhouse and down a small hill toward a thicket of trees. He swings the truck in a sweeping arc and pulls it forward so he is facing back up the driveway. A small white “Pineland” sign is attached to the wire fence, the only giveaway of where you are.
A Special Forces student, dressed in green pants and a black fleece jacket, meets him. Both men pull their ball caps down against the cold as the student lays out a map of Ramseur on the hood of the truck. The team has to destroy an anti-aircraft missile — made by Bob out of PVC pipe, wood and gray spray paint — that threatens the coming U.S. “invasion.”
“I can show you points where I can put you off at,” Pineland Bob says, stabbing at the map with a cigarette clutched in his fist.
“One spot will be adequate,” says the student, who is leading the 13 Special Forces students. A dozen guerrillas armed with machine guns wait in the tree line.
Pineland Bob is the first person the students see when they arrive. He starts by slipping the team his business card. “Bob’s Transportation Service: Troops moved, roadblocks avoided, packages handed off.” He then sets up a rendezvous, usually along a dirt or gravel track, far from enemy spies.
Snyder plays the province’s fire marshal, a cover that Pineland Bob uses to explain his errands dropping off soldiers and picking up food and supplies. A veteran who served in Germany during the Vietnam war, Snyder joined the Pineland Auxiliary nine years ago.
When the soldiers arrive in Pineland, Aubrey McKinnon, a 70-year-old widow, takes them in, feeds them and gives them a warm bed. Bob picks them up the next morning for their first reconnaissance of the town. He shows them the police station, the local diner, the storeroom at the Quick Check food mart where they can hide.
The manager of Sherry’s Diner is the team’s CIA contact, providing the team with information, money and eventually a mission. Bob also shows the team the hospital, where they meet Meiki Rose, a doctor who can treat wounded guerrillas.
An ER doctor in Asheboro in real life, Rose has helped in the exercise for the last two years. The team meets with her to establish an evacuation route and treatment of wounded guerrillas.
For the students, it is a jarring trip through an American small town where people talk about the United States like a far-off land.
This is a place where you can buy a meal with “don,” a yellow-and-orange Monopoly-like currency signed by Seymour Bombs, the Pineland defense minister (there is even an exchange rate). It is a place where dinner could be a hog captured by Ramseur’s mayor and delivered in a garbage bag by Pineland Bob.
Most of all, it is a place where the students learn how to work with people from different cultures in a volatile situation.
“If we do run into a checkpoint, do you have a plan for that?” the student asks. “I have 600 don.”
Under his seat, Pineland Bob keeps a plastic bag full of sugar, which doubles as drugs, but it or money isn’t enough to get them out of trouble with a truck bed full of guerrillas and machine guns.
“If I get pulled at a check point, I am going to rap on the truck,” Pineland Bob says. “You are just going to have to take them out.”
Founded in 1964
The entire alternate universe of Pineland sprang from one man’s vision.
A generation ago, a Green Beret named Ed Brodey “created” Pineland using a set of 1964 encyclopedias as his guide.
If Pineland is a world unto itself, Brodey is its Creator. He has written thousands of pages and built an entire society in miniature, and he’s still doing it today; occasionally he’ll pick up the phone and call someone to talk about his latest refinements.
His desk is cluttered with manuals and sourcebooks on weapons, and his book case is stocked with volumes on Hitler’s rise to power to modern military mainstays like “Black Hawk Down.” He works incessantly to keep his Pineland manual — a thick binder with maps, charts and a detailed history — a living document chock full of real-world scenarios.
He has detailed geography (looks a lot like the East Coast), history (mirrors that of the United States, including Pinelanders fighting on the western front in World War II) and ethnicity (Iraqi refugees flooded Pineland after the Gulf War).
The world he conceived is now part of the actual, physical landscape — Ramseur, that is.
From the outside, Ramseur resembles a small town going about its business. But it’s like one of those old, black-and-white episodes of “The Twilight Zone”: Behind the scenes, everyone is playing a carefully calibrated role.
Cheryl Lake, the Quick Check manager, donates Gatorade, water and coffee. Ramseur police set up checkpoints. And the main character? The town itself. At almost every business there are certificates of appreciation from the Special Forces; providing Fort Bragg with a place to help its soldiers has become part of the community identity.
“Ain’t no one else can claim it,” says James Parrish, a 54 year-old Pinelander with a beard that rivals Snyder’s.
Like other families in Ramseur, the Parrishes have made Pineland a tradition that crosses generations. Parrish’s son, Craig, volunteers as a driver, and the Pineland uniform will eventually go to his grandson, an 11-year-old aspiring Special Forces soldier.
Fighting for ‘Pineland’
Parrish never served in the real-world military. Joining the Pineland “resistance” is his way of compensating.
He gets a call and, as he sees it, is summoned not to war games but to military duty. “It is a passion. It is a chance to pay back the soldiers,” he says. “And maybe we’re just a bunch of rednecks that like to raise hell.”
Like any country torn asunder by war, Pineland has bad guys, too. Here, Jose Cuervo, the local strongman, has a reputation for torturing Pineland guerrillas.
Cast against type, Cuervo is played by Dale Needham, a soft-spoken volunteer firefighter. On the night of the team’s final mission — the night the Special Forces students get to rub Cuervo out — Needham is late. He is putting out a house fire. A real one.
His men mill around his farm near Ramseur holding real AK-47 rifles that fire blanks, waiting to take Rose to their hideout. They kidnapped her the day before, forcing the Special Forces team to act. When Needham gets back, he puts on Cuervo’s uniform and climbs into a van with the others, ready for confrontation.
It isn’t easy being the enemy in your own town. For the past two weeks, Needham has stayed away from the team’s camp, which sits on his mother’s land nearby. When she asked him to move some hay, he had to sneak around to avoid capture. Balancing real life and Pineland life can be a tricky deal.
For anyone passing through, Pineland is invisible. There are clues, though, if you’re looking. If you stop at the diner for some persimmon pudding, you might see two younger guys emerge from a back booth and pay the check in Don. Once, a team left a real American $5 bill as a tip. They were pulled over by a cop in short order.
“He wanted to know where the dollars came from,” Snyder said. “We know it is make believe, but we have to treat it like it is real.”
Even the diner’s gregarious manager, Megan Wood, isn’t what she seems. At night, she cooks up burgers and eggs for all comers. During the day, she meets covertly with Special Forces operatives and feeds them cash and information. Wood, it turns out, is the town spook.
“I am,” says Pineland’s CIA operative, “just doing my part.”
Ready to fire
“Go! Go!” Special Forces students and the guerrillas storm out of Pineland Bob’s pickup.
Cuervo’s hideout is a white two-story dilapidated house on a hill at the end of a long driveway surrounded by overgrown bushes. Rose is upstairs, her face covered in black-and-blue makeup and fake blood. In an attic room only accessible through a staircase tucked behind a door, Cuervo waits.
A burst from a blank-firing AK47 breaks the silence. Perched at the top of the stairs, both men wait anxiously. Cuervo, a cheap cigar wedged between his teeth, squeezes his rifle and steals a glance at his bodyguard.
Now! The crack of gunfire echoes through the house. The assault team storms into the rooms on the first floor. Cuervo hears the Special Forces students grab Rose and hustle her to safety. Then he hears his name: “Where is Cuervo? You see him?”
They find the staircase. Cuervo is ready. One head peeks up. Boom! Fire from the blanks illuminates the attic as Cuervo fires a burst from his rifle.
“Get some guys up here! There is somebody up there! We’ve got people up there!”
Another burst. Then, the rattle of a machine gun. The students gather downstairs. Cuervo, in the last few moments of his “life,” girds for the assault.
“Ready?” he asks his partner.
The soldiers crash up the stairs, guns spitting fire from their muzzles. Cuervo and his bodyguard hold out for a few seconds before falling face down to the floor. A Special Forces student and two guerrillas quickly search Cuervo and his bodyguard. The guerrilla shoots Cuervo again with a pistol before leaving.
“Comin’ down!” they call to their comrades guarding the staircase.
The dead man opens one eye to make sure all’s clear. He gets up on his elbows.
“How many rounds did you get off?” Suddenly, Jose Cuervo is Dale Needham again.
“Not many. My gun kept jamming,” the bodyguard says. “It was like a bolt action.”
Around them, all is quiet.
“We held them off for a while,” the bodyguard says. “We keep failing you. I think you need a new army.”
Practice round
Cuervo’s failures serve a higher purpose — a full-speed practice before the teams go overseas and face real bad guys. But more than the shooting and fighting, just getting the Pinelanders organized, trained and prepared enough to take on the mission means that the team is learning what the Special Forces do.
Too often people get wrapped up in the popular “Rambo” narrative and forget that the Special Forces were created not to destroy things but to sneak behind enemy lines and turn regular joes — the Bob Snyders of many other lands and cultures — into a functioning army.
That’s no small feat when you factor in new languages and unfamiliar customs. But it happens every day in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world. That learning curve starts the first day when Pineland Bob picks them up and introduces them to Pineland.
Don’t be misled by the theatrics. Pinelanders don’t sit around on porches and wax philosophic about what it all means. This isn’t an academic exercise. Strip away its details and Robin Sage is simply military support — citizens doing things to make sure that if war comes, the United States has the advantage.
Capt. T.I. Willis, a member of the Special Forces, went through Robin Sage twice — once as a sergeant, again after accepting a commission. Even on his second stint, he found himself swept up by Pineland and the folks who make it come alive.
“The scenarios become very real. Decades and decades of real-world experience,” he says. “Many folks come back and say, ‘You know when we had that scenario? That exact thing happened to me in Afghanistan.’”
Back at Needham’s farm, Snyder — Pineland Bob — waits by his truck. Tomorrow, he will pick the team up one more time before they leave Pineland for Fort Bragg and graduation. Two weeks after that, Snyder will greet a new team. And the Pineland simulation will reboot to the beginning, ready once again to teach.
“This is my life, being a Pinelander,” Snyder says. His words get hung up in the whiskers of his beard. “I about live it all the time. To me, when them fellows are up here in Pineland it has to be real.”
Every day, Real Bob carries a Pineland Liberation flag in the back of his truck — yellow, red and gray stripes with a black paw and “1870” printed underneath.
When he dies, he will receive a full military funeral with an American flag draped over his coffin — something he has earned by serving his country. But inside, carefully arranged over his body, another totem of service will be visible. There, the Pineland flag will prevail.
So says Pineland Bob — or Bob Snyder. It depends on the wallet.
http://armytimes.com/news/2009/07/ap_pineland_special_forces_070509/
By Kevin Maurer - The Associated Press
Posted : Monday Jul 6, 2009 6:30:23 EDT
RAMSEUR, N.C. — With cigarette-stained fingers, he reaches into the right back pocket of his jeans and fishes out a worn black leather wallet. Inside are a North Carolina driver’s license and some creased greenbacks bearing the face of George Washington.
Now: the other pocket. The wallet is identical, but its contents are like nothing you’ve ever seen. The ID card is recognized nowhere in the world. The work permit is for a job he doesn’t hold. The wad of cash is bright yellow and, in the United States, utterly worthless.
He is tall, aging, with a long gray beard that would make a Civil War general proud. His name? That depends. Such is life in Pineland, a country — well, a “country,” really — where who you are depends on which wallet you choose.
Pineland is a contradiction that exists for the best of causes. It is a real place that does not exist, or, perhaps, a fake place that does. It is a military training ground etched onto the landscape itself — a community with a backstory hewn from whole cloth that helps real American soldiers stay alive in real American wars. And much like the country that contains it, Pineland is a society founded upon an idea — that freedom and a fire to fight for it are more than slogans.
That is what Pineland means. This is what Pineland is:
• A fictional country created five decades ago, made up of 16 counties in central North Carolina and populated by regular Americans who, eight times a year, spend a chunk of their lives participating in a sprawling role-playing exercise.
• The setting for Robin Sage, the Special Forces final exam. In it, students from nearby Fort Bragg parachute and helicopter into Pineland at the end of almost a year of training, organize a guerrilla force and overthrow an oppressive regime on the eve of an American invasion.
• An exercise that borrows liberally from actual American missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Colombia.
Bob Snyder — or the guy in his other wallet, known as “Pineland Bob” — is one of many who populate this “place” in exchange for nothing more than the reimbursement of their fuel expenses. He does it because he can, and because he needs to. “Maybe,” he says, “something I will do will save somebody’s life.”
Patriotism takes many forms — a flag waving on your house, a lapel pin. For Snyder and his compatriots, it means dressing like guerrillas and helping the Army’s elite forces. And exciting as it may be, it isn’t entertainment. It is, for them, as patriotic as saluting the flag.
Getting ready
Pineland Bob guides his truck down a dirt track, past a white farmhouse and down a small hill toward a thicket of trees. He swings the truck in a sweeping arc and pulls it forward so he is facing back up the driveway. A small white “Pineland” sign is attached to the wire fence, the only giveaway of where you are.
A Special Forces student, dressed in green pants and a black fleece jacket, meets him. Both men pull their ball caps down against the cold as the student lays out a map of Ramseur on the hood of the truck. The team has to destroy an anti-aircraft missile — made by Bob out of PVC pipe, wood and gray spray paint — that threatens the coming U.S. “invasion.”
“I can show you points where I can put you off at,” Pineland Bob says, stabbing at the map with a cigarette clutched in his fist.
“One spot will be adequate,” says the student, who is leading the 13 Special Forces students. A dozen guerrillas armed with machine guns wait in the tree line.
Pineland Bob is the first person the students see when they arrive. He starts by slipping the team his business card. “Bob’s Transportation Service: Troops moved, roadblocks avoided, packages handed off.” He then sets up a rendezvous, usually along a dirt or gravel track, far from enemy spies.
Snyder plays the province’s fire marshal, a cover that Pineland Bob uses to explain his errands dropping off soldiers and picking up food and supplies. A veteran who served in Germany during the Vietnam war, Snyder joined the Pineland Auxiliary nine years ago.
When the soldiers arrive in Pineland, Aubrey McKinnon, a 70-year-old widow, takes them in, feeds them and gives them a warm bed. Bob picks them up the next morning for their first reconnaissance of the town. He shows them the police station, the local diner, the storeroom at the Quick Check food mart where they can hide.
The manager of Sherry’s Diner is the team’s CIA contact, providing the team with information, money and eventually a mission. Bob also shows the team the hospital, where they meet Meiki Rose, a doctor who can treat wounded guerrillas.
An ER doctor in Asheboro in real life, Rose has helped in the exercise for the last two years. The team meets with her to establish an evacuation route and treatment of wounded guerrillas.
For the students, it is a jarring trip through an American small town where people talk about the United States like a far-off land.
This is a place where you can buy a meal with “don,” a yellow-and-orange Monopoly-like currency signed by Seymour Bombs, the Pineland defense minister (there is even an exchange rate). It is a place where dinner could be a hog captured by Ramseur’s mayor and delivered in a garbage bag by Pineland Bob.
Most of all, it is a place where the students learn how to work with people from different cultures in a volatile situation.
“If we do run into a checkpoint, do you have a plan for that?” the student asks. “I have 600 don.”
Under his seat, Pineland Bob keeps a plastic bag full of sugar, which doubles as drugs, but it or money isn’t enough to get them out of trouble with a truck bed full of guerrillas and machine guns.
“If I get pulled at a check point, I am going to rap on the truck,” Pineland Bob says. “You are just going to have to take them out.”
Founded in 1964
The entire alternate universe of Pineland sprang from one man’s vision.
A generation ago, a Green Beret named Ed Brodey “created” Pineland using a set of 1964 encyclopedias as his guide.
If Pineland is a world unto itself, Brodey is its Creator. He has written thousands of pages and built an entire society in miniature, and he’s still doing it today; occasionally he’ll pick up the phone and call someone to talk about his latest refinements.
His desk is cluttered with manuals and sourcebooks on weapons, and his book case is stocked with volumes on Hitler’s rise to power to modern military mainstays like “Black Hawk Down.” He works incessantly to keep his Pineland manual — a thick binder with maps, charts and a detailed history — a living document chock full of real-world scenarios.
He has detailed geography (looks a lot like the East Coast), history (mirrors that of the United States, including Pinelanders fighting on the western front in World War II) and ethnicity (Iraqi refugees flooded Pineland after the Gulf War).
The world he conceived is now part of the actual, physical landscape — Ramseur, that is.
From the outside, Ramseur resembles a small town going about its business. But it’s like one of those old, black-and-white episodes of “The Twilight Zone”: Behind the scenes, everyone is playing a carefully calibrated role.
Cheryl Lake, the Quick Check manager, donates Gatorade, water and coffee. Ramseur police set up checkpoints. And the main character? The town itself. At almost every business there are certificates of appreciation from the Special Forces; providing Fort Bragg with a place to help its soldiers has become part of the community identity.
“Ain’t no one else can claim it,” says James Parrish, a 54 year-old Pinelander with a beard that rivals Snyder’s.
Like other families in Ramseur, the Parrishes have made Pineland a tradition that crosses generations. Parrish’s son, Craig, volunteers as a driver, and the Pineland uniform will eventually go to his grandson, an 11-year-old aspiring Special Forces soldier.
Fighting for ‘Pineland’
Parrish never served in the real-world military. Joining the Pineland “resistance” is his way of compensating.
He gets a call and, as he sees it, is summoned not to war games but to military duty. “It is a passion. It is a chance to pay back the soldiers,” he says. “And maybe we’re just a bunch of rednecks that like to raise hell.”
Like any country torn asunder by war, Pineland has bad guys, too. Here, Jose Cuervo, the local strongman, has a reputation for torturing Pineland guerrillas.
Cast against type, Cuervo is played by Dale Needham, a soft-spoken volunteer firefighter. On the night of the team’s final mission — the night the Special Forces students get to rub Cuervo out — Needham is late. He is putting out a house fire. A real one.
His men mill around his farm near Ramseur holding real AK-47 rifles that fire blanks, waiting to take Rose to their hideout. They kidnapped her the day before, forcing the Special Forces team to act. When Needham gets back, he puts on Cuervo’s uniform and climbs into a van with the others, ready for confrontation.
It isn’t easy being the enemy in your own town. For the past two weeks, Needham has stayed away from the team’s camp, which sits on his mother’s land nearby. When she asked him to move some hay, he had to sneak around to avoid capture. Balancing real life and Pineland life can be a tricky deal.
For anyone passing through, Pineland is invisible. There are clues, though, if you’re looking. If you stop at the diner for some persimmon pudding, you might see two younger guys emerge from a back booth and pay the check in Don. Once, a team left a real American $5 bill as a tip. They were pulled over by a cop in short order.
“He wanted to know where the dollars came from,” Snyder said. “We know it is make believe, but we have to treat it like it is real.”
Even the diner’s gregarious manager, Megan Wood, isn’t what she seems. At night, she cooks up burgers and eggs for all comers. During the day, she meets covertly with Special Forces operatives and feeds them cash and information. Wood, it turns out, is the town spook.
“I am,” says Pineland’s CIA operative, “just doing my part.”
Ready to fire
“Go! Go!” Special Forces students and the guerrillas storm out of Pineland Bob’s pickup.
Cuervo’s hideout is a white two-story dilapidated house on a hill at the end of a long driveway surrounded by overgrown bushes. Rose is upstairs, her face covered in black-and-blue makeup and fake blood. In an attic room only accessible through a staircase tucked behind a door, Cuervo waits.
A burst from a blank-firing AK47 breaks the silence. Perched at the top of the stairs, both men wait anxiously. Cuervo, a cheap cigar wedged between his teeth, squeezes his rifle and steals a glance at his bodyguard.
Now! The crack of gunfire echoes through the house. The assault team storms into the rooms on the first floor. Cuervo hears the Special Forces students grab Rose and hustle her to safety. Then he hears his name: “Where is Cuervo? You see him?”
They find the staircase. Cuervo is ready. One head peeks up. Boom! Fire from the blanks illuminates the attic as Cuervo fires a burst from his rifle.
“Get some guys up here! There is somebody up there! We’ve got people up there!”
Another burst. Then, the rattle of a machine gun. The students gather downstairs. Cuervo, in the last few moments of his “life,” girds for the assault.
“Ready?” he asks his partner.
The soldiers crash up the stairs, guns spitting fire from their muzzles. Cuervo and his bodyguard hold out for a few seconds before falling face down to the floor. A Special Forces student and two guerrillas quickly search Cuervo and his bodyguard. The guerrilla shoots Cuervo again with a pistol before leaving.
“Comin’ down!” they call to their comrades guarding the staircase.
The dead man opens one eye to make sure all’s clear. He gets up on his elbows.
“How many rounds did you get off?” Suddenly, Jose Cuervo is Dale Needham again.
“Not many. My gun kept jamming,” the bodyguard says. “It was like a bolt action.”
Around them, all is quiet.
“We held them off for a while,” the bodyguard says. “We keep failing you. I think you need a new army.”
Practice round
Cuervo’s failures serve a higher purpose — a full-speed practice before the teams go overseas and face real bad guys. But more than the shooting and fighting, just getting the Pinelanders organized, trained and prepared enough to take on the mission means that the team is learning what the Special Forces do.
Too often people get wrapped up in the popular “Rambo” narrative and forget that the Special Forces were created not to destroy things but to sneak behind enemy lines and turn regular joes — the Bob Snyders of many other lands and cultures — into a functioning army.
That’s no small feat when you factor in new languages and unfamiliar customs. But it happens every day in Afghanistan, Iraq and around the world. That learning curve starts the first day when Pineland Bob picks them up and introduces them to Pineland.
Don’t be misled by the theatrics. Pinelanders don’t sit around on porches and wax philosophic about what it all means. This isn’t an academic exercise. Strip away its details and Robin Sage is simply military support — citizens doing things to make sure that if war comes, the United States has the advantage.
Capt. T.I. Willis, a member of the Special Forces, went through Robin Sage twice — once as a sergeant, again after accepting a commission. Even on his second stint, he found himself swept up by Pineland and the folks who make it come alive.
“The scenarios become very real. Decades and decades of real-world experience,” he says. “Many folks come back and say, ‘You know when we had that scenario? That exact thing happened to me in Afghanistan.’”
Back at Needham’s farm, Snyder — Pineland Bob — waits by his truck. Tomorrow, he will pick the team up one more time before they leave Pineland for Fort Bragg and graduation. Two weeks after that, Snyder will greet a new team. And the Pineland simulation will reboot to the beginning, ready once again to teach.
“This is my life, being a Pinelander,” Snyder says. His words get hung up in the whiskers of his beard. “I about live it all the time. To me, when them fellows are up here in Pineland it has to be real.”
Every day, Real Bob carries a Pineland Liberation flag in the back of his truck — yellow, red and gray stripes with a black paw and “1870” printed underneath.
When he dies, he will receive a full military funeral with an American flag draped over his coffin — something he has earned by serving his country. But inside, carefully arranged over his body, another totem of service will be visible. There, the Pineland flag will prevail.
So says Pineland Bob — or Bob Snyder. It depends on the wallet.
http://armytimes.com/news/2009/07/ap_pineland_special_forces_070509/