CLAYTON - In Washington and Beaufort counties, "Support the Troops" is far from a meaningless phrase. But the Navy's insistence on Site C, on the Washington-Beaufort county line, for an outlying landing field has stunned many. It disregards scientific data, the warnings of military bird-strike abatement experts and the professional opinions of U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service personnel.

Many people are dismayed that the Navy would have so little regard for its pilots' safety and that a $57 million F/A 18 isn't an investment worth better protecting. The experts agree -- a bird strike accident isn't a matter of if but when.

According to Col. Jeffrey J. Short of the U.S. Air Force Reserve, "In 25 years of dealing with military BASH [Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard] issues, I cannot recall a worse place to situate an airfield for jet training." A radar study conducted by Ronald L. Merritt, a former chief of the Air Force's BASH Task Force, stated, "There are very few places in the United States where this level of threat exists."

The Fish & Wildlife Service is listed by the Navy as a cooperating agency on the site's Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, but when agency personnel told the truth about their findings, the Navy decided it needed to find other experts. Reportedly, Fish & Wildlife personnel have been forbidden to talk about their views.

The original environmental impact statement was flawed. That is why U.S. District Court Judge Terrence W. Boyle ruled that the Navy had not addressed environmental issues required by the National Environmental Policy Act. He ordered it to conduct a new study. But that newly released study again fails to address the bird-strike issue adequately.

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THE THING THAT HAS CHANGED is the Navy's decision not to buy all the land for the proposed OLF outright. Rather it would lease some portions under restricted easements, leading to the families that farm the land being told by the Navy that they could not grow what they're currently growing -- wheat, corn and soybeans. This is part of the Navy's "improved" bird-strike mitigation plan. It would starve the birds out of the fields by denying them the leavings of the field.

However, these crops are what the farmers are set up to grow. They have established markets in place. The Navy says farmers should switch to grass, cotton and trees.

A farmer's investment in equipment can run into millions of dollars. The Navy doesn't say who should pay to replace existing equipment (machinery for wheat, soybeans and corn is useless for growing cotton). It doesn't matter to the Navy that the Agriculture Department says the world cotton market is depressed and is likely to remain so. It doesn't matter to the Navy that growing grass doesn't pay, or that trees take 20 years to grow to a profitable size.

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ONE HAS TO WONDER at the Navy's considerable effort and insistence to acquire acreage that by its own admission it does not need. The Southern Environmental Law Center reviewed over 200,000 pages of documents and found that the Navy itself had concluded that the existing OLF in Virginia was adequate to meet its needs. So why the insistence on Site C? Why does the Navy believe it needs 33,000 acres around a concrete landing strip?

Make no mistake, this is not a base, this is a runway for practice takeoffs and landings. Thirty-three thousand acres is over 50 square miles -- the size of a small city.

All that nice open land probably looks good from 10,000 feet in the air. The northeastern section of North Carolina is some of the last undeveloped land on the Eastern seaboard. You can see it yourself from Google Earth. But what you can't see from a plane or a satellite is what's taking place on the ground.

The family farmers and the birds of the wildlife refuges have a symbiotic relationship. The birds do more than eat the farmers' leavings of grain and corn. They also leave nitrogen for the next crop and they dine on insects and weeds. Good land stewardship should be rewarded, not betrayed.

In these days of heightened national security you don't hear much mention of one of America's most vital interests, our food supply. As we continue to export jobs and import food, I hope that we as a nation don't come to rue the day that we didn't stand up and protect some of our true American heroes -- our family farmers.

(Laura Marciniak is retired from the U.S. Air Force, where she worked on jet aircraft in Texas and South Korea and debriefed pilots on maintenance issues. She also has a degree in biology.)

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