ARMY BASE CLOSING Seeing heroes go saddens village

The town recently named a highway for the battalion.
FELICITY, Ohio (AP) -- Residents are upset over a plan to close a military installation whose soldiers have served overseas in Iraq and also helped on the home front, building parks and clearing roads after storms.
The facility, a former Army Nike missile base that's now home to the 216th Engineer Battalion, would close by the end of next year in an Army restructuring plan that includes the Ohio National Guard.
"It's sad, because these are soldiers who have served their country in Iraq and who have done a whole lot for this community for a long time," said Sherri Smith, whose family runs the Feed Mill Restaurant in this village of about 900, 30 miles southeast of Cincinnati.
The 216th was honored with parades in Felicity and nearby Bethel after 200 soldiers from the unit came home in February from Iraq, where three of the members were killed and 23 were wounded.
In October, state Route 756, which runs alongside the installation, was renamed the "216th Engineer Battalion Memorial Highway."
Restructuring plan
"Here we are, two months later, with the state telling us that the unit that had a highway named after it will no longer exist," said Clermont County Commissioner Bob Proud. "There is something fundamentally wrong about this."
He said the closure would hurt the Guard's recruiting in the area.
Maj. Gen. Gregory L. Wayt, Ohio's adjutant general, sent a memo in October explaining the Ohio National Guard changes to state Sen. Tom Niehaus, a New Richmond Republican whose district includes the 216th's base.
Gov. Bob Taft has to approve the plan, which also would move the 216th's Headquarters Support Company from an Ohio National Guard armory in Hamilton to a new, $15 million complex in Woodlawn.
Many of the Ohio National Guard's 64 facilities around the state, including the Felicity installation, "do not meet basic building code standards or Department of the Army criteria," Wayt wrote in his memo.
Most of the nearly 80 soldiers who now train in Felicity will end up in 216th operations in Woodlawn, Chillicothe or Portsmouth, Guard officials say.
Residents react
"It's a slap in the face to our community," said Anita Brill, whose husband, Mike, works at the installation's maintenance shop. "You might be able to do this in the city and nobody would notice. But we're country folk out here; and you don't just come into our community and take away something that means so much to us."
Retired Sgt. Paul Brondhaver, 37, of Union Township, is angered by the decision to close the facility, where he was a new recruit at age 18.
"This is a home to heroes," said Brondhaver, who was wounded in an attack in Iraq that killed his friend, Pfc. Samuel Bowen. "What an insult to brave men and women who served. To each and every soldier in this unit, this place is home."