BABADAG TRAINING AREA, Romania (June 14, 2026) — The first time U.S. Marine Corps Master Sgt. Daniel Porter saw an assault amphibious vehicle, he felt the ground shake.
He was a young Marine, fresh to the schoolhouse, when one of the hulking tracked vehicles rolled past him on the pavement. The rumble moved up through his boots and into his chest. He knew then, without much deliberation, that he had found his home.
That was 22 years ago. Today, Porter stands at Babadag Training Area in Romania as the logistics chief for 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion — watching the same platform, weathered and battle-proven, make its final appearance in a U.S. Marine Corps exercise. Exercise Sea Breeze 26 marks the last operational employment of the assault amphibious vehicle, known to those who served in and around it simply as Trax, in the Marine Corps. After more than 50 years of service, the platform is being retired and, in a fitting capstone to its legacy, transferred to partner nations who will continue to employ it in defense of the Black Sea region.
“This has been my home since I started in the Marine Corps,” said Porter. “So 22 years I’ve lived on this vehicle — and to see this being its sundown, the last time the Marine Corps is going to be using it and then passing it off to our partner nations … it’s been the culminating event of my career, as well as the culminating event for the AAV platform in the Marine Corps.”
The AAV-P7/A1 entered U.S. Marine Corps service in 1972. In the decades that followed, the platform adapted through weapons upgrades, suspension changes, and communications system overhauls. It saw combat in Lebanon in 1982, carried Marines ashore in Iraq, and became the backbone of amphibious assault doctrine for an entire generation of Amtrackers. Through all of it, the base platform never fundamentally changed — it was adapted, maintained back to life by crews who knew every bolt and weld.
Lt. Col. Nishan Campbell, the battalion commander of 4th Assault Amphibian Battalion and callsign Gator Six, knows that intimacy well. He has held every billet an assault officer can hold. He has slept in the driver’s station with his head propped on the brake pedal. He has scrubbed his head on non-skid in the dark, short-tracked vehicles on the side of mountain trails at night, and yelled down from the turret to a radio operator over the scream of the turbo.
“Amtrak is that type two fun,” Campbell said, standing atop the vehicle at Babadag. “It really sucks when you’re doing it. But it’s the best when you come back and think about how much it sucked. You’re all in the suck together.”
There is no other place Campbell would rather be for the platform’s final chapter.
“It’s a surreal experience to be sitting in an amphibious assault vehicle, having spent my entire career in this vehicle or around this vehicle,” said Campbell. “All of us are Amtrak till the day we die. There’s no changing that. But to actually be boots inside this hull as it goes downrange for the last time in an exercise — that’s something.”
At Sea Breeze 26, the AAV is performing in its traditional roles — mechanized assault platform, logistics carrier, direct fire asset. It is also being tested against the realities of a drone-saturated battlefield, where cover, concealment, and individual dispersion now matter in ways unrecognizable to earlier generations of Amtrackers. The exercise brings together seven nations under a combined battalion-level task force, demonstrating the kind of rapid interoperability that U.S. Marine Corps leaders say sends its own message.
“We want our adversaries to see the very distinct fact that we can pull seven nations together overnight, create a battalion staff, integrate, and start executing missions within hours,” Campbell said. “There is no doubt that if we were here an additional week, we would be heads and shoulders more lethal than we are today.”
As they walked the length of the vehicle together at Babadag — running through systems, checking the hull, opening hatches — Campbell and Porter moved like men returning to a place they know better than anywhere else. They pointed out the mushroom indicators that tell a crew whether the vehicle is seaworthy. They talked about the plenum — the engine compartment that doubled as a solar shower and, on cold nights in the field, the only source of warmth for miles.
“Popping the plenum up after a long day, having your solar shower, baking in the sun for a little while — the plenum shower has got to be the peak of field living,” Campbell said.
Porter remembered the vehicle on the mountainside of Mount Fuji in winter — a heater that actually worked, a cup of coffee, a full view of the battlespace below. Campbell remembered something quieter: sitting at the bow as the Pacific sun started to set, counting waves with his crew, waiting on a report, the smell of the ocean rising off the water before a night splash.
“The smell of the ocean prior to doing amphibious ops is intoxicating,” Campbell said. “I’m going to miss hearing that heater fire up while the infantry are freezing outside.”
He paused near the trooper hatch and cracked it open. “One last time,” he said.
The retirement of the AAV is not the end of the mission. The platform is being replaced in the Marine Corps inventory by the amphibious combat vehicle, built for the evolving demands of the littoral fight. The AAVs themselves will not be warehoused — as part of the Sea Breeze 26 capstone, partner nations in the Black Sea region will receive the vehicles alongside Marine instructor cadres whose decades of institutional knowledge transfer with them.
“Our partner nations are getting a very capable vehicle,” Campbell said. “She’s had service now for over 50 years — half a century. Passing it off, it’s definitely bittersweet. None of us are ready to see her go.”
Porter, whose career ends alongside the platform that shaped it, offered a message to the Marines who will carry the mission forward.
“Embrace the change that’s coming,” he said. “Adapt to the new vehicle and utilize it to the best of your ability. Learn its ins and outs like I’ve done throughout my career with this vehicle. It’s been a great home for me. I’ve loved every minute of my experience on it.”
At the end of the walk-around, Campbell stood for a moment at the stern. After every exercise, he said, the deck plates come off and everything gets sprayed out — the grime, the bilge water, all of it. You go to sleep covered in grease and sand and wake up the same way. That’s part of being an Amtracker.
Then he looked at the vehicle one more time.
“See you, old girl,” he said. “Last ride.”