Word: soldier
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...salesman who vaguely lusts after his assistant, who is both a religious fanatic and, more secretively, an erotic dancer. She is drawn to a soulful bartender, whose insane father, heard but never seen, she tends in the evenings. The bartender, in turn, is the confidant of an unemployed former soldier whose fiancée is one of the realtor's clients. The realtor's beautiful, inexplicably lonely sister, incidentally, almost hooks up with the sometime soldier. But that doesn't work out, either...
...Israelis who share the growing horror for the human rights abuses that are carried out daily by the IDF. Try Tanya Reinhart’s recent Road Map to Nowhere perhaps; or if the unadorned words of ordinary Israeli citizens are preferred, take for example this former IDF soldier: “I didn’t humiliate Palestinians most of the time, but I stood by and did nothing while it happened... I didn’t think I was someone evil. I had become the essence of the evil without even thinking about it.” SONJA...
...longer tours are accompanied by a guaranteed year at home for soldiers between deployments, a move hailed by many as beneficial for troop morale and important for staving off burnout. But that year includes a rigorous schedule of month-long stints at the National Training Centers and live-fire field exercises that can last days at a time. Even if soldiers are back in the U.S. for a year, little more than half of that time is spent with family, and the next deployment always looms large. "We go home and immediately start preparing for the next deployment," says Polk...
...Todd Polk, stumbling from his tent in the bitter mountain cold, knew it was going to be bad news. "I thought it was going to be a major problem," he says. "Maybe another 9/11." While the subject of the meeting was nothing like the 2001 terrorist attacks, for the soldiers of the 3rd Squadron, 71st Calvary unit of the 10th Mountain Division, it may have similar consequences. Two days before the brigade was due to leave Afghanistan after its year-long stint - some units, in fact, were already in Kuwait awaiting flights home - Captain Polk and his team learned that...
...Soldiers deploying abroad have always had to contend with missing a child's birth, a sibling's wedding or a parent's death. They face fatigue and frustration no matter the duration of stay. Their spouses suffer at home, and marriages fall apart under the strain of separation. And the stress of deployment in a hostile combat zone has a corrosive effect on discipline. Three more months may not seem that long to a civilian, but to a soldier already on the ground, it's another 90 days in which a lot could go wrong. "It's like running...