U.S. and Lithuanian personnel were still working Thursday to recover four missing U.S. soldiers whose Hercules armored vehicle was found submerged in a body of water at a training site in Lithuania on Wednesday, officials said.
The soldiers, all part of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, have been missing since early Tuesday, when they were conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle during a training exercise, according to U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The training site is the General Silvestras Žukauskas Training Area near Pabrade, north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania.
Search and recovery efforts have continued without pause since the soldiers were reported missing, the Army said in a statement Thursday. The initial search included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain.
Now, personnel are focusing on the area where the armored vehicle was found.
“We are leveraging every available U.S. and Lithuanian asset to coordinate for and provide the required resources for this effort,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commanding general of 1st Armored Division, said in a statement.
As of Thursday, thick mud and soft ground were keeping emergency personnel from accessing the vehicle and complicating and slowing the recovery efforts, the Army said. Engineers were creating berms to establish a contained area, from which water and mud could be dredged away to better stabilize the ground.
“Due to the terrain, this is an incredibly complex engineering effort. The team on the ground is working to remove enough water and mud for rescue teams to safely reach, stabilize, and access the vehicle,” Maj. Robin Bruce, 1st Armored Division Engineer, said in a statement. “The team is exploring every available option to speed up this process.”
Families of the soldiers are being updated about the recovery efforts, the Army said. The service has not yet released the names of the four troops.
NATO on Wednesday clarified comments Secretary-General Mark Rutte made earlier that day, when he suggested the soldiers had died, even though the U.S. Army said their fate was not yet confirmed.
“The search is ongoing,” NATO said in a statement posted on X. “We regret any confusion about remarks @SecGenNATO delivered on this today. He was referring to emerging news reports & was not confirming the fate of the missing, which is still unknown.”
During a trip to Warsaw, Rutte told reporters that he had received word of the deaths of the four soldiers while he was delivering a lecture, and that his thoughts were with their families and with the United States.
“This is still early news so we do not know the details. This is really terrible news and our thoughts are with the families and loved ones,” Rutte said in Warsaw.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Nikki Wentling is a senior editor at Military Times. She's reported on veterans and military communities for nearly a decade and has also covered technology, politics, health care and crime. Her work has earned multiple honors from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, the Arkansas Associated Press Managing Editors and others.
