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Trash can be deadly. You can get a hint of that from the contract solicitation issued Tuesday by the Defense Logistics Agency’s European disposition office seeking “hazardous waste services in southwest Asia.” Lord knows, after a decade of war the U.S. military needs help getting rid of these deadly leftovers. The Pentagon made clear that [...]
I am not a veteran and I am not a military family member. But I have had the honor and privilege of knowing many military families over the last seven years. My father served in the Navy during WWII long before I was born. He taught me about service, honor and integrity. And I am [...]
Part of the reason that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta fears that sequestration – the budget axe slated to chop another $500 billion or so out of the military over the coming decade if Congress can’t get its act together – is how each side is welded to its will-not-budge goals. Of course, he was speaking [...]
When the war in Afghanistan began ten years ago, some of the most grievously wounded troops have come through Brooke Army Medical Center, a sprawling green campus less than 10 miles from downtown San Antonio. BAMC, as the troops call it, has long been home to the Department of Defense’s top burn unit. Then 2007, 600,000 people [...]
David Wood has done some of the finest reporting on the wounds of war, both seen and unseen. His latest lays bare the serious genital wounding of hundreds of U.S. troops that’s rarely acknowledged: “Who’s going to want to be with me now?” wondered Marine Staff Sgt. Glen Silva, 39, after an IED blast shattered [...]
When the Pentagon was wrestling with the idea of ending the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban on gay men and women serving openly in the military, the Marine Corps quickly came to be seen as the service most opposed to the change. After all, General James Amos said he feared lifting the ban would be [...]
There are reports that alcohol illicitly consumed by Army Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in Afghanistan a week ago may have been the final link in a chain of stressors that caused him to “snap” and slaughter 16 civilians. Alcohol has always served for some as a salve for the mental, and sometimes physical, wounds of [...]
The war in Iraq is over. But the memories and recollections will be with us for decades to come. It’s nice, for a change, to focus on those who dedicated their time in country to saving, rather than taking, lives. Dr. Todd Baker has just published Baghdad ER: Fifteen Minutes, about his tour as chief [...]
The impact felt at the ground-level from our troops involved in same-sex marriages is gaining some high-level attention. On Friday of last week, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. issued this controversial letter to House Speaker John Boehner in response to the lawsuits filed this October in my home state of Massachusetts by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network. The letter serves [...]
