It’s hard for most Americans to realize, as we noted in our cover story this week, that there is a major war involving U.S. troops underway in Afghanistan. It’s a splotchy kind of war, with no well-defined front. That makes it a difficult war to cover. Sometimes we have to rely on the folks wearing military uniforms to give us a …
Army
Veterans Day Salute: Veteran Vet Generator
Happy Veterans Day!
Where the heck do those 22 million U.S. military veterans come from? Well, Ray Moran has done more than his share to bring them in. The retired Army sergeant major has spent decades recruiting soldiers. Having just turned 82, he has earned his nickname Old Soldier en route to getting more than 1,000 young men …
TIME Veterans Day Twitter Chat–2:30 pm (1430) under #TIMEVets
In honor of Veterans Day, we will be holding a special Twitter discussion about the disconnect between the U.S. military, veterans returning home from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rest of American society under the hashtag #TIMEVets.
Oh, The (War) Stories You’ll Hear
By Alex Horton, Official VA Blogger
Rain had transformed Baghdad’s many unpaved roads into one giant muddy sinkhole, and the engine of a Stryker vehicle moaned in a failed effort to escape. The vehicle sunk under the weight of its armor and required a tow. The driver and vehicle commander leapt to the ground to attach towing …
An Army Apart: The Widening Military-Civilian Gap
The U.S. military and American society are drifting apart. It’s tough inside the civilian world to discern the drift. But troops in all the military services sense it, smell it — and talk about it. So do their superiors. We have a professional military of volunteers that has been stoically at war for more than a decade. But as the …
Military Suicide: A Former Army Psychiatrist’s Veterans Day Reflections
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzceLmVnj6A]
The rates of suicide in the United States Army began to rise in 2004, and continued climbing until 2010. Then the suicide rate in the active duty finally started to level off, but continues to rise in National Guard soldiers. It remains twice as high as it was prior to the wars in …
Why Do Soldiers Torture?
It’s because the Army doesn’t train them to walk along that razor’s edge where gleaning intelligence sometimes is honed into vengeance and retribution. Writes Kevin Bell, a former Army captain now studying the Middle East at Princeton, in the latest issue of Army magazine, published by the service itself:
Unfortunately the
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The Pathbreaker: A Conversation with Major General Marcia Anderson
Audiences attending the Opportunity Nation Summit on the campus of Columbia University will hear from some of the leading experts in government, international affairs and the media. They will also get a testimony on public service by one of the Army’s pathbreaking leaders, Maj. Gen. Marcia Anderson.
Anderson, who completed ROTC at …
What’s Going On? The Joint Chiefs Should Be Partying Like It’s 2007…
The spectacle now infecting the Pentagon would be humorous, if it weren’t so serious. The notion that the military can cut $450 billion out of its next-decade budget of something like $7 trillion – but not a penny more – suggests an (artillery) shell game’s afoot.
The Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction – the …
Dr. – and Lieutenant Colonel – Dave Cabrera, RIP
I read the names of every U.S. troop killed in action, and every once in awhile there’s a jolt that comes when I recognize one on the list. That’s the case among the four U.S. Army troops killed in that Taliban car bombing Saturday on one of Kabul’s main roads. Among those who perished were Staff Sgt. Christopher R. Newman of …
About Those Status-of-Forces Agreements
The U.S. military says it had no choice but to pull out of Iraq by year’s end because Baghdad would not give U.S. troops immunity from local prosecution. U.S. troops overseas almost always are covered by a so-called Status-of-Forces Agreement, which bars local prosecution in favor of giving jurisdiction to the U.S. military and its …
About Those Suspected Chinese-American Troops’ Suicides
The U.S. military is fervently hoping this trend doesn’t continue: just because U.S. troops in Afghanistan allegedly physically abused a pair of Chinese-American troops before each took his own life doesn’t mean they were picked on because of their ethnicity. We’ve reported recently on the suspected suicides of Marine Harry …
Driving and Dying
What kills most troops who die in their first year back home? Suicide? That’s a predictable response, but it’s wrong. It’s traffic accidents:
Government officials are worried about the number of young veterans getting into fatal car accidents after they return home from the battlefield. The ones dying most often tend to be young,
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