Thirty-one members of the 755th Air Expeditionary Squadron became the first airmen sent to the Air Force’s new deployment transition center at Ramstein AB, Germany, on their way home from a combat deployment. These explosive ordnance disposal airmen had just completed a six-month combat tour at Kandahar, Afghanistan. They participated in the center’s three-day program to help airmen gradually transition back to their lives back home through activities like group discussions and social events like sightseeing. “I don’t want to sound too melodramatic about it, but it’s nice to have something at the end where it’s almost like a little bit of closure, where you can just relax as a unit again and everybody understands what they all went through while we were deployed,” said Capt. Lee Turcotte, 755th Delta EOD Flight commander. (Ramstein report by Capt. John Ross)
A provision in the fiscal 2025 defense policy bill will require the Defense Department to include the military occupational specialty of service members who die by suicide in its annual report on suicide deaths, though it remains to be seen how much data the department will actually disclose.