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.
Military History
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 …
War Graffiti Coming Home
Combat is often seconds of terror surrounded by months of boredom. So troops play video games, visit the gym – and paint graffiti. OK. So it’s not what we think of when we think of graffiti. It’s more informational graphics, depicting unit insignias and other stuff that helps weld units together. The U.S. military is currently …
Navy Secret: First Women Readying for Sub Assignments
Last Friday marked the graduation from submariners’ school of the first women slated to board U.S. Navy submarines as official, full-time. members of their crews. They’ll start reporting to their subs as early as this week. Thank God we had the New London Day to tell us about it:
The women who are about to break through a
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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 …
Semper F-Stop
If you’re a Marine with a coffee table, you’ll enjoy Always Faithful: U.S. Marines in World War II Combat. It’s a collection of 100 of the best photographs of the leathernecks island-hopping across the Pacific, printed in a large format with few words to clutter up the iconic images (no jarhead wisecracks, please). Author and …
Catch-22: Relevant Today?
Joseph Heller’s classic is 50 years old. Unfortunately, it still rings true in today’s military, according to this BBC article:
In Catch-22, for those lower down the food chain, there is nowhere to go to question methods. The same can be true today mainly because the army employs the same top-down reporting system that was in
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A Navajo Code Talker…Speaks So We Can Understand, at Last
For those of us to young to remember, the exploits of the Navajo code talkers during World War II have become legend. They were the guys who transmitted messages in their native language (with some English mixed in) between the Marine units closing in on Japan – a code the Japanese could not crack. Chester Nez, now 90, tells his …
Why Are Today’s Anti-War Protests So Muted?
For folks of a certain age, the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations bring back memories of Chicago (“The whole world is watching”) 1968, and the anti-war protest I covered in Boston. How come there is scant protest about the Afghanistan and Iraq wars now?
Is it because they have been waged so brilliantly and economically that …
Mullen’s Mulligan
It usually takes months for retired chairmen of the Joint Chiefs to have their formal portraits hung in the Pentagon’s E-ring hallway, alongside all those who have come before. But not so in the case of Admiral Mike Mullen, who left his post as the nation’s top military officer September 30.
Strolling along that wood-lined …
“What Will Afghanistan Be Like in 10 Years?”
We know what the past decade has been like in Afghanistan — 1,822 American troops killed, at a financial cost of a half-trillion dollars. Was it worth it? What will this country look like in a decade? Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and Stephen Biddle, an Afghanistan expert at the Council on …
A Death in the (Nuclear) Family
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UspUEjMLsdA]
The world’s biggest nuclear weapon — the infamous minivan-sized megaton B53 — died Tuesday, of old age. The five-ton bomb was about 50 years old. The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration announced its passing at the Pantex nuclear plant outside Amarillo, …