Word: infantryman
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...talking for hours in close tents and stifling bunkers, young men who hope, because they are lance corporals and gunnery sergeants, that they are above whimpering. The 1982 high school graduate from Pontiac, Mich., writing a letter home ("Don't worry, really!"), shakes his dried-up Bic. An infantryman with a tiny mirror, still not used to the G.I. buzz cut, stares at himself. A lieutenant from Live Oak, Fla., peeks nervously over the sandbag ramparts and wonders about the alien landscape. A private forks out the last globs of mushy tinned meat and then, dog-tired from worrying...
Much of the current tension stems from differences between G.I.s and West German peace activists that cannot be easily bridged. "When 100,000 people come out to protest against what you are doing, it does not exactly make you feel wanted or good about yourself," says a young U.S. infantryman. Observes Ed Reavis, a former soldier who now reports for the U.S. armed forces' newspaper Stars and Stripes: "The [U.S.] military are by and large conservative. They see the peace activists as their enemies, as Communists and troublemakers...
...high school. While most soldiers relaxed by shopping, sunbathing or enjoying the beautiful if war-pocked landscape, some Israelis pondered the grim vision of more death and destruction if negotiations fail and the final battle for Beirut takes place. "We do not want to go in there," sighed an infantryman, gazing down on the capital. "We want to go home." Across the Green Line in West Beirut, a few miles away, a Palestinian guerrilla took another view. "We will fight here to the last man if we must," he said. "We have nowhere else to go." -By William Drozdiak. Reported...
Manpower. This may be the most critical problem of all. As Republican Senator Roger Jepsen of Iowa puts it: "We can spend billions annually on the most modern and sophisticated weaponry, but in the final analysis it is the infantryman, sailor, pilot and medic that will determine our nation's strength." For the moment, all the armed services are meeting their enlistment goals and the quality of recruits has improved dramatically. From October through March, 68% of all volunteers joining the Army were high school graduates, vs. only 37% a year earlier. The increase coincided almost exactly with the effective...
...veterans he met. Says Hillenbrand: "For months after leaving Indochina, the innocent whoosh of a water heater could trigger the memory of a rocket attack. It was not hard for me to know how veterans felt when they returned." New York Bureau Chief Peter Stoler, who served as an infantryman in Korea for 14 months, was also able to bring a soldier's point of view to his conversations with the head of Viet Nam Veterans of America. In Washington, D.C., Correspondent David Jackson spent time with debilitated victims of the toxic herbicide Agent Orange and reported on their...