Word: battalions
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...Fort Hood, many soldiers at Fort Carson have endured at least two tours of duty, some three or more, sometimes with only a few months sandwiched in for them to reacquaint themselves with their families. Since 2007, eight men - all from a single combat-weary 500-man infantry battalion nicknamed Lethal Warriors - have been charged with carrying out a string of murders and attempted murders in Colorado Springs. So far, four have been convicted. In a drive-by shooting, a young couple was killed while hanging up signs for a garage sale; a woman was run over...
Three days before, according to McCullough, Khalik had been among several Afghans caught in the middle of a Taliban attack on a U.S. battalion's foot patrols, on the road between the Helmand villages of Bagrabat and Hazarapas. "My men were walking on the road," he told Haji Assidullah and his fellow elder Jon Mohammed. "The car with these men [the detainees] sped up, drove right at them, didn't stop, almost hit two of my men, then the car behind that one stopped. Three men got out and started firing at my men. Two others on the side...
...remarkable book called The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. It is the best grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected area of Baghdad. This was the first attempt to implement the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and the troops have their doubts about the new tactics. Major Brent Cummings, the second-in-command, reads the doctrine...
...these new tactics have an impact. The partnership with the Iraqis is tentative at best. The social services don't pan out. The troops continue to patrol in humvees, as before; they are blown up by IEDs, as before. The counterinsurgency manual gathers dust on the battalion commander's desk, then disappears. But somehow ... it works. A year later, the neighborhood is markedly quieter - but it's hard to say why. (See pictures of life returning to Iraq's streets...
...animals to death and whose primary weapons are subliminal music, disarming hugs and symbols of peace (like baby lambs). In 1979, a lieut. colonel in the U.S. Army named Jim Channon imagined just that, and wrote his ideas down in a 125-page confidential report called "The First Earth Battalion." Thirty years later, British journalist Jon Ronson explored the legacy of Channon's New Age manual and the U.S. military's surprising - and often sinister - enthusiasm for supernatural warfare in his 2004 book, The Men Who Stare at Goats. TIME spoke with Ronson about turning his book into a Hollywood...