Word: soldierism
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...When Dear John starts, Channing Tatum looks like the likely Ali since he's flat on his back in a soldier's uniform, his blood seeping into a mud puddle. Tatum is John Tyree, a special-forces soldier madly in love with chaste, do-gooder college student Savannah (Amanda Seyfried), whom he met during a two-week leave in the spring of 2001. We go to flashbacks, and as John enfolds Savannah in his big, beautiful arms, with Sept. 11 hovering like a hurricane over the South Carolina beaches, you take bets on whether that mud puddle was in Afghanistan...
...Honduras, to get our open-water dive certification. The island of Utila, known for its diving and nightlife, is frequented by dive junkies and backpackers from all over the world. At the dive hostel, we roomed with a cranberry farmer from Oregon, belted out Taylor Swift with a soldier who had just returned from Afghanistan, and strummed a guitar with a paratrooper in the Israeli army. It reminded me of my meals in Annenberg during the first few weeks of school, meeting my classmates and listening to the unique and amazing stories of what they have done and how they...
...same thing happened in Afghanistan. The absurdities of the NATO campaign, in which each country's forces operate according to their own particular caveats - many of which include no fighting - shocked Gates during his visit a year and a half ago. "He heard that we had a soldier who was shot and was in Spain's AOR [area of responsibility]. The Spanish troops had to call back to Madrid to seek permission to medevac him," a Pentagon aide told me. "The soldier lived. But Gates was furious." He also heard that while wounded soldiers in Iraq were guaranteed a medevac...
...through Gates, reversed the decision last year to release photographs from the Abu Ghraib scandal as well as cases of military abuse of detainees that had been withheld by the Bush Administration. Gates personally issued an angry letter to the Associated Press after it distributed a photograph of a soldier dying in Afghanistan, against the wishes of his family. The AP argued that the public needed to know what was going on there. "If you apply the standard that [the Pentagon] decides what images the public will see, think of the civilian massacres we would not know about. The poor...
...latter quality that has made Gates so valuable. He is a problem solver, a fixer and a loyal soldier. In Washington those qualities go a long way. For a long time now, the wise men in Washington have been the problem solvers, and the fixers have been regarded as sages. But the fixer is not the moral leader, the one who provides American policy with its purposes. It's worth remembering that what finally matters are the values and the principles he is fixing...