Word: soldiers
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...conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have proved the worth of unmanned aircraft--which are cheaper and, because there is no pilot to be shot down, politically more palatable than traditional airplanes. The thousand-plus UAVs in the military's arsenal range from tiny craft that can fit in a soldier's palm to ones the size of business jets. Military analysts are predicting that within two decades, UAVs may even take over the jobs of pilots flying fighter jets. It makes economic sense; the $4 million Predator is a bargain compared with the Air Force's newest fighter...
Uzodinma Iweala (U-zod-din-ma EE-wall-a), a 23-year-old Harvard graduate who grew up in Washington, D.C., has written an extraordinary debut novel, Beasts of No Nation (HarperCollins), that is basking in critical acclaim. The book tells the story of Agu, a child soldier in an unnamed country in Western Africa, who has been recruited by a unit of guerrilla fighters after watching his own father being slaughtered. The author visited Nigeria, where his mother is currently the finance minister, frequently when he was growing up, and lived there last year, working with refugees. We chatted...
...senior year of high school, I read a Newsweek article about child soldiers in Sierra Leone. It was a new topic to me, and I wanted to find out more. So I sat down after reading the article and wrote a really short story, more like just a sketch of a really brutal and violent scene. I [thought], how can this little kid be killing people? It doesn't really make any sense to me, but I wanted to see if I could capture that. I put it aside for the next four or five years, until my junior year...
...China was the only person I spoke to who was a former child soldier. Of course, I read her autobiography, which is called Child Soldier: Fighting for My Life. Then I read a lot of other autobiographies of child soldiers and people who had been through conflicts, and read all of these Amnesty International Human Rights Watch-UN reports on children in conflict and child combatants. I read child psychology textbooks, to look at development, and how violence affects development, and how children perceive death, and punishment and reward. Additionally, I talked with [my own] family members and other Nigerians...
...DIED. ALFRED ANDERSON, 109, Scotland's oldest man and last surviving British veteran of the 1914 Christmas Truce of World War I; in Newtyle, Scotland. As an 18-year-old soldier serving in the Black Watch regiment, he heard the guns fall silent along the Western Front on Christmas Day as British and German soldiers emerged from the trenches to greet each other in no-man's-land; they sang carols, swapped cigarettes and played soccer until fighting resumed that afternoon. In 1998, he was awarded France's Legion of Honor for his war service...