US Army 1st Infantry Division

By 1990, the 1st Infantry Division had spent nearly two decades stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, training once again for the war it had prepared for before Vietnam: a massed Soviet armored thrust across the plains of Central Europe. That war never came.

In this four-part series, we’ll follow the story of the Big Red One across more than 100 years of history, exploring how the division fought, adapted, and evolved through changing forms of warfare. This series is divided into four posts: This first post begins where the story started: the trenches …