Word: battlefield
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Commanders in urban environments can't survey the entire battlefield and instead see only bits and pieces; it's like playing chess while viewing only four squares on the board. This battlefield compression means that low-ranking corporals and sergeants--not colonels and captains--must often make life-and-death decisions. These choices come fast and furious when you're fighting downtown: 90% of the targets are less than 50 yards away and seen for only seconds. Killing innocent civilians--or your own men--is a risk that goes with the terrain. A quarter of all explosive rounds turn into...
...America going to hell in a hot tub? No, but at the very least, in today's voyeuristic shows, love is a battlefield. Unlike, say, The Dating Game of the '60s, they're less about love connection than love disconnection. More dates go hilariously badly than well--the woman on Blind Date, for instance, who belched her way through roller-skating and drinks with a straitlaced doctor. And if the participants don't humiliate themselves sufficiently, the shows finish the job, with snide commentary from the hosts and Pop-Up Video-style graphics (a lunkish guy at a gym gets...
Americans have always been intrigued by the idea that the battlefield makes people a little crazy; it's a staple of (anti)war movies, from Paths of Glory (1957) to Born on the Fourth of July (1989). But what happened at Fort Bragg may turn out to be more mundane--and in a way sadder--since domestic violence remains a chronic problem...
There will never be just one explanation for why Andrea Floyd, Teresa Nieves, Jennifer Wright and Marilyn Griffin are dead. Even off the battlefield, military life is stressful, but men in the military have almost exactly the same rate of spousal abuse as civilians of the same age and demographic profile, according to Richard Heyman of the State University of New York. "I do think it's odd for there to be a concentration in one locale of homicides like this," says Deborah Tucker, co-chair of a Defense Department task force on domestic violence. "But if you think about...
...Qaeda's cause. On a page titled "Don't Be With the Enemy Against Us," supporters are schooled in the uses of disinformation by al-Qaeda's enemies, and the consequent need for its members and supporters to shut out extraneous sources of information. "The mujahed leaders on the battlefield should be the first and last source of information." The site appears to share the Pentagon's concern to avoid any unnecessary leaks, warning that even scraps of apparently innocuous information - such as names or workplaces of fellow members - can reveal the group's plans to the enemy, and should...