Deborah Cole

And they have been for now 81 years.

I spoke to a high school teacher in town who compared it to like a bombshell.

Well, you have to kind of scroll back 81 years, you know, to the end of the Second World War.

So at that time, you know, Germany was completely physically and morally destroyed.

And the American troops led by General Patton marched into this region in March 1945 and have never left.

And it's been a place...

to project US power throughout a very broad region, as well as protecting European allies who are part of NATO.

So the peak was during the Cold War.

At the end of World War II, there were 1.6 million US troops, but that was a short-lived experience.

And then after that, they drew down into the hundreds of thousands in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, up and through the 80s.

you still had more than 250,000 US troops in Germany.

Well, Landstuhl is known mainly for the medical center there, and that is the biggest U.S.

hospital outside the United States.

But it is part of a whole community that is part of the Kaiserslautern military community.

And that includes the Rammstein Air Base, which is also enormously important for U.S.

military operations in Europe and military action in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and

and in Africa.

So the whole community taken together has about 50,000 US troops, support staff, and then families who are based there.

So these are people who are not just, you know, kind of passing through, they come and they and they stay for a few years with their families.

That's right.