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This is a couple months old-two months old today in fact-but I happened upon it the other day in a comment thread about the war in Afghanistan or somesuch:

A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility [PDF]

This reminds me, kind of sideways, of a story I think I’ve told before: we were driving north through the desert of southern Iraq and talking ( Read more... )

Without getting into all of it-mostly because I just have too much anger to spread around as regards the event and subsequent discussion of it-one thing stands out to me about the recent revelation of footage from the shooting of the Reuters employees in July 2007. And, this may seem dispassionately technical, but what struck me was that this is ( Read more... )

Once upon a time, I went to Iraq.

Along the way, I did what most reservists end up doing: parlaying civilian expertise into military pseudo-specialties. The first of these, for me, was learning Arabic at an accelerated pace which, while neat, turned out to be mostly useless because we were awash with local nationals and Arabic-speaking Americans ( Read more... )

We had heard rumors about it, almost as soon as we got there in March of 2004: the US military was going to close Abu Ghraib for good, soon, move all the prisoners down to some camp near Kuwait, bulldoze it into the ground, release our Marine rifle company to do the sorts of things that Marines are more accustomed to doing. The rumor persisted ( Read more... )

I knew two guys who deserted from the Marine Corps.

Though, let me clarify that for a second. I also knew quite a few guys who, in the Reserves, just sort of stopped coming to drill. Thanks to the legal intricacies of the military and reserve system, these dudes didn't actually, you know, desert... they just stopped coming into work. If the ( Read more... )

In the Marines, the vast majority of your junior Marines are lance corporals. It's the E-3 rank and the last "automatic" rank that an individual will pick up strictly on account of time spent in the service, so it's where the most individuals tend to accumulate. As such, lance corporals also become the channel of information, disinformation, and ( Read more... )

Why does this happen?

Shiites Propose Plan to Break Deadlock ( Read more... )

I was going to post something about the blog link becoming the new footnote and how, like footnotes, those that go unexamined can help prop up faulty assumptions. Unfortunately, I seem to have lost track of one of my examples. My other is a post by James D. MacDonald over at makinglight. In it, MacDonald asserts that 8000 servicepeoples from the Army, AF, ( Read more... )