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To join the Army’s Old Guard, the public face of the military at Arlington Cemetery, it helps to be a perfectionist. Can this Iraq veteran get in sync?
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Gulf Coast reeling as BP ‘top kill’ effort fails
COMPANY FALLS BACK ON CONTAINMENT STRATEGY
As oil gushes unabated,
‘there’s no silver bullet’ to end crisis
by Joel Achenbach and Alec MacGillis
It is the well that will not die. BP’s three-day effort to throttle the leaking gulf oil well with multiple blasts of heavy mud has failed. The attempted “top kill” of the well was abandoned late Saturday afternoon, leaving the huge Macondo field deep beneath the sea floor once again free to pump at least half a million gallons of crude a day into the gulf. “I can say we tried. But what I can also say is this
During Old Guard training, Army Sgt. Nicholas Pata performs the mandatory 75-minute standing proficiency test.
burns them off with a lighter. Next, he polishes his shoes and brass. Then out comes the lint brush, because a speck of lint, like a scuffed shoe or a medal more than one- sixteenth of an inch out of place, could cause him to fail, even to be sent back for an extra week of maniacally repet- itive training. ¶ Pata, who is 27 and looks every bit the model soldier, does not want to fail. He wants to join the Old Guard, the most obsessive-compulsive unit in the Army. Pata has survived a harrowing 15-month tour in
on
washingtonpost.com
Impact of War This article is part of a year-long series on the impact of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars back home. A blog with firsthand accounts is at
voices.washingtonpost.com/impact-of-war.
Photo gallery See Army Sgt. Nicholas Pata and others going through the training to become members of the Old Guard, from ironing their uniforms to the completion of the course.
washingtonpost.com/photo
MARCHING ORDERS
T
story by Christian Davenport and photos by Jahi Chikwendiu
hey are crazy about creases in the Old Guard, which is why it takes Army Sgt. Nicholas Pata more than an hour to press his uniform the night before inspection. ¶ They are obsessive about loose threads, too, which is why Pata
Iraq. He spent the week after 9/11 digging for bodies in the rubble of Ground Zero. On nights and weekends, he vol- unteers with the Prince George’s County fire department. But it’s not yet clear that he has what it takes to make it in the precision unit that performs funerals at Arlington Na- tional Cemetery and guards the Tomb of the Unknowns. ¶ Headquartered at Fort Myer in Arlington County, the Old Guard, the Army’s oldest active-duty infantry unit, es- corts the president and serves at inaugurations and state dinners. Each Memorial Day weekend, it helps plant thou- sands of flags at Arlington, and once again the unit be- comes the public face of the military — a stoic symbol of a nation’s resolve, perfect to within a sixteenth of an inch.
old guard continued on A12
Big footnote in Sasquatch tale?
Virginia ‘sightings’ excite believers, but neighbors aren’t harried about it
by Paul Schwartzman
in thornburg, va.
B
illy Willard says he’s on the verge of a major discovery that could change the way humans
think about the natural world, not to mention their need for a creature- proof home security system. Here in Spotsylvania County, in the forests around Lake Anna, Wil- lard claims there have been 14 sight- ings in the past decade of that most fabled of cryptozoic beasts: Bigfoot. Or Sasquatch, as the elusive, ape-
like brute is referred to in more high- minded circles — and on the side of Willard’s blue pickup. The decal on
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the truck reads “Sasquatch Watch of Virginia,” of which Willard is chief pooh-bah (when he’s not earning a living installing and removing underground home oil tanks). Go ahead, call him a loon, a flake, a huckster. He’s heard it all. But Wil- lard knows what he knows, which is that three people from this area — a woman, her husband and their granddaughter — told him they saw a shaggy, super-size figure on two legs gallivanting across their wood- ed property. Last month, Willard led a weeklong expedition to the site, where he installed five motion-sen- sor cameras that will snap photos if the big galoot wanders by again. Willard, 41, says he’d like to lead a
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tour of the property and introduce the witnesses, really he would. But the woman who says she saw what she believes could have been Bigfoot fears an avalanche of ridicule, which is why Willard is left to begin deliv- ering his version of what happened a few miles away, in the parking lot of a Dairy Queen. “We believe we may be close to some kind of major discovery,” he says. “All the things they would need are here, fresh water, shelter in the woods. The high concentration of sightings tells me they’re here.” He interrupts his monologue to answer his cellphone, the ring tone
sasquatch continued on A10
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scares everybody, the fact that we can’t make this well stop flowing, or haven’t succeeded in that so far,” Doug Suttles, BP’s chief operating officer, said in a late-day news conference. “There’s no silver bullet to stop this leak,” Coast Guard Rear Adm. Mary Landry said. The top kill — a term most Americans had never heard until it became part of the new national vocabu- lary along with “blowout preventer,” “containment dome” and “junk shot” — had been seen as the best hope for turning the oil spill into something finite in volume. Now BP must fall back on a containment strategy in the near term, hoping to capture as much oil as possible. Sitting on the sea floor and awaiting deployment is
a new containment dome, what the company calls the Lower Marine Riser Package cap. With robotic sub- marines, the company will sever the leaking, kinked riser pipe that emerges from the top of the blowout preventer, the five-story-tall contraption on top of the
oil continued on A4
Cleanup raises health concerns. | A5
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LARIS KARKLIS/THE WASHINGTON POST
Mexican pirates get hooks into Texas fishermen
by William Booth
zapata, tex. — Falcon Lake is famous for its mon- ster bass and for the maniacal obsession of the fisher- men who come from all over Texas — and the world — to stalk them. Now this remote reservoir that strad- dles the international boundary is known for some- thing else: pirates. In the past month, crews of outlaws in a small ar- mada of banged-up skiffs and high-powered bass boats launched from the Mexican shore have am- bushed bass anglers from the Texas side innocently casting their plastic worms over favorite spots. The buccaneers have struck in Mexican waters but within sight of the Texas shore. Dressed in black, the pirates brandish automatic weapons, carry radio cellphones and board the an- glers’ boats. They demand weapons or drugs from their captives, but finding neither, seem satisfied with taking $400 or $500 as booty, according to law en- forcement officials and victims’ accounts. There is a saying about not messing with Texas, and the idea that criminals are preying on American an-
BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Billy Willard holds a plaster cast that he made several years ago of an alleged Sasquatch footprint.
pirates continued on A8
Border crossers swarm Ariz. | A3
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The Washington Post Year 133, No. 176
CONTENTS© 2010
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