Here are recent headlines about the military in Kansas:Fort Riley ¢ 1st Infantry Division(Washington Post) Unit’s Mission: Survive 4 Miles To Remember Fallen Comrade: And so the leaders of Alpha Company had a decision to make: drive in Humvees and risk getting blown up by a roadside bomb, which is what happened to their friend, who bled to death as they worked to save him, or try to minimize the risk of a bomb by walking the four miles in searing summer heat, which would increase the chances of being shot by a sniper. Such were the choices last week in eastern Baghdad, an area that has become more dangerous since the inception of the Baghdad security plan earlier this year. A largely Shiite area, it had once been less deadly than those parts of Baghdad with Sunni-Shiite fault lines. It was now twitching with daily gunfire, mortars, rockets, grenades and, most of all, roadside bombs, all targeting U.S. soldiers. The attackers were thought to be affiliated with the militia of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. All through June, more and more of those attacks were aimed at Alpha Company and its parent unit, the 2nd Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, which had arrived in eastern Baghdad in mid-February as part of President Bush’s troop escalation. In March, its first full month of deployment, the battalion was hit by 12 roadside bombs, referred to by the military as improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. In April, as soldiers began moving into neighborhood outposts and rounding up suspected insurgents, that number was 21. In May, as they met with local leaders and got some community improvement projects going, the number was 27.(Pueblo Chieftain) Veteran airman from Coaldale falls to gunfire in Afghanistan: Air Force Master Sgt. Randy Gillespie of Coaldale was killed Monday while training soldiers in Herat, Afghanistan, according to local family members. Gillespie, 44, was on his second tour to Afghanistan and was fatally wounded by gunfire Monday outside the military base at Herat. An interpreter also was killed. … Family members said Gillespie had been sent to Fort Riley, Kan., earlier this year to learn how to train Afghan soldiers. He had been in Afghanistan since April. “So this time around, he was training Afghan fighters,” Roger Gillespie said. “When I talked to him several weeks ago, he said the military base was protected by Marines and it seemed pretty safe.”Fort Leavenworth(Inside the Army, via Main and Central blog) “The major concern is, while we’re doing all this COIN counterinsurgency] . . . do we have battalions that can still do an attack or a major defense, or brigades that can coordinate three battalions attacking an objective?” said Dennis Tighe, deputy director of the Combined Arms Center for Training . “Maybe we’ve got some problems there.” Tighe added that the greatest concern is not that the next generation of battlefield commanders are learning skills like foreign military advising, policing and reconstruction — but that they may be learning them at the expense of those hard skills. “We’re probably still good on individual gunnery skills and small unit gunnery skills, but we’ve got some captains that haven’t done a major gunnery,” he explained.[(Muskogee Phoenix) State’s last Buffalo Soldier dies: A man believed to be the lone surviving Buffalo Soldier in Oklahoma died Monday at his Tulsa home. Dr. Wilbert Fred Wilson, 86, will be buried at 2 p.m. Monday at the Fort Gibson National Cemetery with full military honors. A number of state dignitaries are expected to attend the ceremony. Wilson joined the U.S. Army’s 10th U.S. Horse Cavalry Regiment on March 4, 1941, as a machine gunner. He was among the last recruits to ride for the 10th Cavalry, an all-black regiment formed in 1866 at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.