Two Air Force researchers are suggesting it’s not the soldiers who kill themselves who should shoulder all the blame for their deaths. We – all of us, U.S. society writ large – may also be responsible.
“There appear to be systemic factors that play an important role in the rise in military suicides,” says George …
It’s one of the biggest – and potentially, most consequential – decisions President Obama has made (not that he had much choice, according to some). He has announced that the 45,000 U.S. troops still Iraq will all be home for the holidays. Critics have said Iraq is too fragile for the U.S. to pull out – after eight bloody …
“Trust me, the first thing you do is check your [junk.]”
This is how a rehabbing Army soldier describes the immediate post-IED blast scene in Bob Drury’s new piece “Signature Wound,” available through Amazon’s Kindle Singles. Drury, a contributing editor and foreign correspondent for Men’s Health, explores the …
A Taliban suicide bomber killed 12 Americans — four troops and eight contract workers — four Afghans, and a Canadian soldier, when he rammed his bomb-laden Toyota into an armored bus in Kabul Saturday. The brazen attack marked the deadliest strike against Americans in the Afghan capital since the U.S. invaded 10 years ago this …
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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Clifford Stanley, the retired two-star Marine general who spent the past 20 months as the Pentagon’s personnel chief, is stepping down. He came in for a lot of criticism for an allegedly lousy management style. There are IG probes into alleged misspent money and personnel mismanagement — a bizarre topic for the guy in charge of …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Dear Mr. Capps,
We made a decision on your claim for service connected compensation received on July 22, 2010.
The letter came in today’s mail. Day 470; for me, Decision Day. Things have moved really quickly in the past week. On October 20th, I posted a note here that I had been waiting 15 months—463 days—for a decision on my …
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 …
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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Interesting comment at a Tuesday morning breakfast with Army Col. Kevin Galloway, the service’s pain czar*:
You used to drive around outside a military post and what was outside — pawnshops and tattoo parlors. You know what you see now? You see pain clinics popping up. They’re meeting an unmet need that’s inside the gate. Some
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