Protecting the president of the United States involves far more than being willing to step into the path of gunfire.

As part of their extensive training — ranging from firearms to first aid — all of the several thousand Secret Service agents and officers also have to learn how to drive.

The training, which takes place at a 550-meter (546-yard) track in the state of Maryland, goes way beyond the fundamentals of defensive driving. Among the techniques is the J-turn, in which the driver spins a reversing vehicle 180 degrees and quickly continues, facing forward, with brisk acceleration.

 

WATCH: ‘Beast,’ Bus, Motorcycles — Secret Service Has to Drive it All

​Protective driving

For the Secret Service, this is part of “protective driving,” which has one goal: “Safely get the protectee out of the area — the ‘kill zone’ — and to move them to a safe location as quickly and expeditiously as possible,” according to Thomas Murach, Secret Service assistant to the special agent-in-charge.

Even after the completion of that five-day training, Secret Service personnel are not ready to get behind the wheel of the 9,000-kilogram (9.9-ton) armored presidential stretch limousine known as Cadillac One, or The Beast.

Anyone driving the president or vice president must have passed a separate, advanced five-day training known as the Protective Operations Driving Course, which has about a 60 percent pass rate.

“If an agent doesn’t pass the advanced course, they would continue normal duty and can try again at a later date,” according to Secret Service Public Affairs Specialist Julia McMurray. She added, “It’s not a never-ending cycle of attempts and fails. They can only go a few times.”

​Motorcycles, mountain bikes

Another special course, considered just as challenging as limousine driving, is for the motorcycles, which roll with sidecars in better weather.

“It’s heavy. It’s almost like 900 pounds (400 kilograms),” explained motorcyclist and Secret Service Technical Office Lloyd Llamas about the agency’s big bikes. “And you’re running with two wheels. And they make you do things that you can’t imagine that you could possibly do with that.”

Those are not the Secret Service’s only two-wheelers. Agents and officers must also learn special techniques to ride bicycles.

They also are instructed in special techniques for all-terrain vehicles and even battery-powered golf carts.

Another unique Secret Service vehicle — and the only one the president is likely to ride that is bigger than The Beast — is a bus known as Ground Force One, last seen on the road during Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign.

The roomy $1 million black bus, with 47 square meters of interior space, has a twin that was also used by the Secret Service to drive Obama’s unsuccessful general election opponent, Mitt Romney.

Different street types

Driving the president not only means getting behind the wheel in different types of executive transportation, but also different kinds of streets.

For example, different countries have various curb designs. So the Secret Service, at its training facility in Laurel, had part of one street built with two different types of curbs so that drivers of full-sized utility vehicles could learn how to properly run over them.

All of this drilling is meant to prevent a repeat of the Secret Service’s worst moment on Nov. 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas by a sniper’s bullet as he sat in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental open convertible.

That compelled a hardening of titanium plating, as well as a permanent bullet-proof roof for the car, which was used by Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, until 1967.

​Evolving training

Formal training for Secret Service drivers didn’t begin until 1970.

The training techniques have changed as the vehicles have evolved — going all the way back to the 1939 Lincoln K-Series car, which was President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite ride.

Roosevelt’s 12-cylinder-engine vehicle had a retractable roof, allowing the polio-stricken president to appear before crowds without leaving the car. It also was the first to be significantly modified for the protection of a president, equipped with armor-plated doors, bulletproof tires, thick windows and storage compartments for weapons for the agents who rode along standing on extra-wide running boards and gripping exterior handles.

“In the past, we taught what’s called threshold-breaking. Or if your car didn’t have anti-lock brakes, you would bring the wheels to the point they’re almost locked up but not quite,” Murach said.

Some elements dealing with stability control were removed from the training, as modern vehicles are more stable. And tire technology has evolved with the rubber gripping much better nowadays on slick surfaces.

The Secret Service, which is under the Department of Homeland Security, protects not only the president and vice president, their immediate family members, and former presidents and first ladies, but also visiting foreign leaders and major candidates in U.S. presidential campaigns.

Successful candidates who end up getting a ride to the White House driveway quickly find out they can get anything they want as president — except the keys to the car.
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Protecting the president of the United States involves far more than being willing to step into the path of gunfire. As VOA’s White House bureau chief Steve Herman reports from the Secret Service’s training center in Laurel, Maryland, every one of its agents and officers also has to learn how to drive.
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3D printers have been used to create incredible things, from robots to prosthetic arms. Now the U.S. Marines have used the technology to make a 3D-printed concrete footbridge. Khrystyna Shevchenko traveled to Camp Pendleton in California to take a look. Anna Rice narrates her story.
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At the final press conference marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a question was raised as to whether NATO was partly responsible for current tensions with Moscow, “because it has expanded right up to the borders of Russia” and whether it was a good idea to “publicly advertise open invitations to Georgia and Ukraine” to join the alliance.

Jens Stoltenberg, NATO Secretary General since October 2014, responded by saying: “Just the idea that it is a provocation against Russia that Georgia aspires for membership, or that Ukraine does the same, is really, really dangerous.”

“As soon as you accept that that’s a provocation against Russia, you accept that Russia has the right to decide what neighbors can do,” he said, adding that doing so equates accepting “a world order where big powers can decide what neighbors can or cannot do,” which will then lead to re-establishing “the whole idea of spheres of influence.”

The Cold War-era Warsaw Pact, where Central and Eastern European nations were subjected to Soviet Union’s guidelines and dictates, is widely seen as an example and demonstration of “spheres of influence” at work.

Stoltenberg, who twice had served as Norwegian prime minister before assuming the leadership role at NATO, spoke of his and his country’s experience.  Describing his native land as another “small country bordering Russia,” Stoltenberg said: “I’m very glad that back in 1949 when we joined NATO, the United States and the United Kingdom and the other founding members of NATO never accepted (the notion) that the Soviet Union could decide what Norway could (or could not) do.”

Earlier in the week, in a speech delivered at the North Atlantic Council, the principal political decision-making body within NATO, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo marked the 70th anniversary of NATO by recalling his own personal experience.

“As a young armor officer a couple decades back, I patrolled the border between then-East Germany and West Germany. I know the nature of the regimes that want to undermine what it is we’re here to talk about today.

 

Pompeo reiterated in his speech that NATO’s success lies in deterrence, democratic underpinnings and collective defense commitment.

Two years ago, the United States Senate voted overwhelmingly in support of Montenegro’s membership in NATO; it is now reviewing North Macedonia’s bid.

Speaking on the growing size of NATO, Stoltenberg noted that “the enlargement is not NATO moving east,” instead, he pointed out, it is due to Central and Eastern European nations’ wish – often determination – to seek membership in the alliance.

Daniel S. Hamilton, a transatlantic relations expert at Johns Hopkins University, told VOA that over the years – indeed the last seven decades – NATO has demonstrated a “sort of a magnetic quality.”

In February of this year, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko described pursuing membership in NATO and the European Union as a “strategic mission” and amended his country’s constitution to the effect that Ukraine may one day become a members of these organizations.

Meanwhile, Georgia, another country often described as situated on Russia’s doorstep, is acknowledged as “one of the alliance’s closest partners.” Observers have noted Georgia’s significant contribution in support of NATO’s war effort in Afghanistan as an unambiguous sign of its commitment to the organization and existing member states.

Ultimately, “Georgia and Ukraine are independent sovereign nations which have the sovereign right to choose their own paths,” said NATO’s secretary general.

 
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A federal judge on Friday halted sales of high-capacity ammunition magazines in California, giving state officials a chance to appeal his order last week that allowed their sale for the first time in nearly 20 years.

U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez barred further sales until the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals considers whether to reinstate the state’s ban on magazines holding more than 10 bullets.

But the judge said those who bought the extended magazines since his initial order a week ago may keep them without fear of being prosecuted while the appeal proceeds.

A week of sales

Hundreds of thousands of gun owners may have bought the magazines since Benitez threw out the state’s ban last week as infringing on their Second Amendment right to bear arms, said Chuck Michel, an attorney for the National Rifle Association and the California Rifle & Pistol Association who filed the lawsuit that led to the ruling.

Under Benitez’s order, no one in California is permitted to manufacture, import, buy or sell large-capacity magazines as of 5 p.m. Friday.

California has prohibited such magazines since 2000, though people who had the magazines before then were allowed to keep them. Benitez last week threw out both the 2000 law and a 2016 law and ballot measure banning possession even by those who had owned them legally.

“All the people who bought the magazines in the last week are protected from prosecution, but any further purchase of these magazines is illegal for the moment,” Michel said. “There was 20 years of pent up demand for these self-defense tools, and several hundred thousand people bought them in the last week, maybe more than several hundred thousand.”

Difficult to take back

Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who sought the stay, warned in a court filing that it would be difficult for the state to remove the newly purchased magazines, even if the ban is reinstated.

Becerra cited a half-dozen mass shootings nationwide since 2011 where the killers used large-capacity magazines.

“California leads the nation when it comes to common-sense gun laws. We should all be ensuring the safety of our communities, not fighting against long-standing laws that improve public safety,” Becerra said in a statement. He added that he’s confident the ban is constitutional.

Benitez acknowledged in his six-page stay order that other judges, in California and elsewhere, have upheld bans on high-capacity magazines.

“The Court understands that strong emotions are felt by people of good will on both sides of the Constitutional and social policy questions. The Court understands that thoughtful and law-abiding citizens can and do firmly hold competing opinions on firearm magazine restrictions,” he wrote.

“These concerns auger in favor of judicial deliberation. There is an immeasurable societal benefit of maintaining the immediate status quo while the process of judicial review takes place.”
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Rick Eppenbaugh thought he had seen it all. He served in the Marines and now works with troubled teens. However, nothing prepared him for the flood that invaded his life, engulfing his home and everything around it near Pacific Junction, Iowa.

“I’ve always been a pretty hardcore guy, being in the military and working with street kids. That’s what I do. (I) was kind of a street kid myself. I was a pretty tough guy, but this is hard to take, pretty hard to take.”

Many homes are unlivable in the U.S. Midwest, especially those located within a few kilometers of a stream or river. Eppenbaugh said last summer was unusually wet and a March storm, combined with fluctuating temperatures, caused the winter snow to quickly melt and overwhelm the levees, flooding roads, farmland and homes.

 

WATCH: Water Came up Fast, Destroyed Iowa Dream Home

Evacuation by boat

Eppenbaugh was surprised the water rose so quickly.

“There was water over the road already in half an hour from when the levy breached. It covered a mile, a mile and a half, flooded all (the) fields, flooded the interstate,” Eppenbaugh said.

He, his wife and five dogs were eventually evacuated by boat, but they had to leave his wife’s two beloved horses behind.

“They were standing out front when we got in that boat and motored away. No one’s seen them alive or dead,” Eppenbaugh said.

The family is temporarily living in a home in Omaha owned by Eppenbaugh’s boss. However, the farm dogs are cooped up in the house and unused to living in the city, and Eppenbaugh is anxious to start rebuilding his house.

Water rose high

On his second trip home after the flood, he and two friends, with a borrowed rowboat, slowly made their way across what looks like a lake. The only sign that they are actually over flooded farmland are the corn stalks that occasionally poke out of the water.

He had always dreamed of owning a home in the countryside. He realized that dream six years ago when his children were grown and had their own homes. He and his wife bought a farmhouse built in 1924, just a 30 minute drive from the city of Omaha.

“I used to just sit out here at night. Stars were real bright. Dogs are running around,” Eppenbaugh said.

The water had receded enough that Eppenbaugh’s home looked like it was on an island. From the waterlines seen inside the walls of the house, the water rose to about 30 centimeters below the ceiling. Everything on his first floor had been underwater. His refrigerator was now on its side. Precious family photos were wet and ruined.

“Until you start looking, you don’t really even know what you’ve lost,” Eppenbaugh said, as he looked around to see what he could salvage.

He said he will have to replace his floors, walls and he hopes the foundation is still good.

“All the money we put in this place in the last six years is just wasted,” he said.

​‘It’s so overwhelming’

Eppenbaugh calmly looked around, but did not reflect the shock he had been experiencing since the flood.

“I’ve been crying for two weeks. Trust me, it’s not that calm of a deal. It’s just … it’s so overwhelming.”

After picking up a few things, Eppenbaugh had to walk and row away, until the water receded.

No one in the area had flood insurance. He said it’s too expensive. Eppenbaugh estimated it may take up to a year to rebuild his home piece by piece.

“It’s pretty overwhelming. You just kind of feel numb.”
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