Word: fortes
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...According to Wednesday's USA Today, boot camp ain't what it used to be. At Fort Jackson, S.C., the Army's largest basic training facility, attrition rates, which stood at 23 percent in December 1998, are expected to dip below 10 percent. The recruits aren't any better - it's the training that's become more merciful, holding on to would-be dropouts with "a raft of programs to help woebegone trainees graduate...
...That was the name we had for the Physical Training Remedial Program when I went through basic training at Fort Jackson for nine weeks last fall. It was (to us) the dark and hopeless purgatory for the chubby, lazy or just physically confounded who couldn't pass their PT test the first, second, third or seventh time. People went there and disappeared from view, but they rarely went home. The Army, strapped for recruits in the economic boom times, wasn't about to lose anybody just because they couldn't hack it right away; they were willing to wait...
...same debate in the barracks, and "It's too easy" was one of my main complaints in the dispatches I sent home from Fort Jackson (that and the boredom, and for a while my sore feet). Ask drill sergeants, and some blame gender-integrated training, others the "doggone Nintendo generation," others the end-of-camp customer-satisfaction-like surveys that actually ask departing trainees what they thought. (Somebody does read them, and the squeaky wheels are apparently getting the greasing.) The saddest part came at the end, when, after two months of taunting us with threats of expulsion...
...glass Parthenon, like Mies van der Rohe's National Gallery in Berlin, or an elaborately "timeless" spatial event, like Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. It is not an operatic signature building, like Frank Gehry's titanium-sheathed meganautilus in Bilbao, Spain. Still less is it a feat of conspicuously externalized luxury, like Richard Meier's Getty Center, poised in marble aloofness above Los Angeles...
...FORT MADISON, IOWA Residents find inventive ways of reviving Main Street...