Word: tours
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...areas where the surge has been concentrated, many find that their task has changed dramatically since their previous tours. Staff Sergeant Shane Plummer, 27, was an infantryman during the 2003 assault on Baghdad and was posted to the Diyala River Valley in 2005. These days, he's based at Combat Outpost Cashe, 12 miles (20 km) southeast of Baghdad, where he focuses more on building relationships with Iraqis than on fighting them. With each tour, he says, "the mission has changed more toward making friends than finding...
Returning troops find that some Iraqis, too, are more willing to make friends. Plummer, who is originally from Kansas, remembers how the Iraqis he encountered on his 2005 tour "would give us dirty looks and wouldn't tell us where the bad guys were." He says the mood has shifted to the friendliness he encountered on his first tour, when many Iraqis were grateful to be freed from Saddam Hussein's rule. Plummer says Iraqis are now happy to engage with him and his men on matters ranging from trash collection to counterinsurgency operations. "The more they get involved...
...mood is very different in places like Mosul, where things have gotten worse in the past year. Norris, the son of an Army chaplain, spent his previous tour in Diyala, but some of his men have had firsthand experience of Mosul. Fleenor earned a Purple Heart for the injuries he sustained here in 2004, and he lost his best friend, Sergeant Frank Hernandez, to a roadside bomb during the same deployment. As he walks the confines of Rabiya, Fleenor still wears a black metal band on his wrist etched with Hernandez's name. Sergeant Tony Carter, 33, who also served...
While the orchestra rehearsed, our minders took the journalists on a whirlwind tour of Pyongyang. One highlight: a hill overlooking the city, where a gigantic bronze statue of the Great Leader stands in front of the Korean Revolutionary Museum. There was no one around as we snapped photos of one another in front of the Big Man, but as we were about to leave, a group of around 40 people walked up in orderly rows, approaching the statue reverentially and then bowing deeply. But before we could ask what, exactly, the Great Leader meant to them, their tour guide herded...
Dramatically, the show feels a little padded (shorter stays and another stop on this tour might have helped), but musically, it's original and extraordinarily winning. Stew, a bald, bespectacled guitarist who leads the band and narrates, is a professorial presence onstage whose flat, prosy singing voice gives an ironic grounding to the lyrical, gently rocking melodies. He's a model of a new kind of stage composer, one neither steeped in Broadway tradition nor reacting overtly against it. "Without casting any aspersions," says Stew, "I don't think most of the so-called rock onstage sounds like anything...