About 120 members of the Wisconsin Army National Guard are back from nine months supervising detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Capt. Brian Schwalbach commands the 32nd Military Police Company, which was honored at a welcome home ceremony on Thursday in Milwaukee.
He said it was a challenging mission, but it didn’t change when President Donald Trump took office.
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“You know, that was something we were concerned about when we were deployed. In terms of, OK, well, now that there’s a new administration,in, what’s going to happen? Is anything going to happen?” he said. “It was very even-keeled, a big reason I can attribute that is the professionalism of my soldiers, and the soldiers that were in our unit.”
Schwalbach said the detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station are there for a “severe reason, ” referring to “enemy combatant” status applied to many of the detainees during the “war on terror” the Bush administration declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But Schwalbach said the Wisconsin troops didn’t focus on that. Schwalbach declined comment on whether Guantanamo should be closed, just saying his unit had a job to do. President Barack Obama signed an order in 2009, to close the “Gitmo” detention facilities, but they remain open. However, CNN reports there were 41 detainees in January of this year, compared to a peak of 684 in 2003.
Officials with the Wisconsin National Guard said 65 soldiers from a different unit were deployed to the Middle East in February, and that 85 more are set to go to the same region later this spring.
