Word: uniting
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Much of the unit had come together in the early months of 2006 at Fort Richardson, an Army base just outside Anchorage, Alaska. Jacob Fritz had graduated from West Point in 2005. Built like a football lineman, Fritz had grown up a Nebraskan farm boy in the town of Verdon, where his graduating class in high school had only 11 students. At West Point, Fritz earned the nickname "Jolly Jake" for his perpetual smile. The soldiers from Fort Richardson grew to like Fritz too. He had the kind of résumé you see among the young élite...
...Chism was a young Army specialist with a thick accent from his native Baton Rouge, La. The other guys called him "Gator," and Chism listed his ethnicity on MySpace as Redneck/ Southern. Johnathon Millican, 20, a private from Alabama, also spoke in a thick Southern accent and was the unit's resident comedian. Private Shawn Falter was from upstate New York and enlisted in the military in 2005, following three older brothers who served in the Army and the Marines. He liked country music. On the weekend before he deployed to Iraq in 2006, Falter was out with Staff Sergeant...
...maintaining a constant presence. But Block said there was no comparison between Fallujah in 2004 and his current assignment. "This one's a lot quieter," he said. "Our area of operation is much more secure." Sgt. Salgado agrees. On his last deployment, in volatile Diyala province, Salgado said his unit "got hit with IEDs [improvised explosive devices, that is, roadside bombs] on a daily basis." Since returning to Iraq in April the unit has found a couple of roadside bombs before they went off, and suffered no casualties from them. "In [2005] I lost a couple soldiers that were very...
...Back then the immediate problem for American forces was the Sunni insurgency. Four years later sectarian divisions in Iraqi society and the mainly Shi'a Iraqi security forces are largely driving the conflict. Marr, a 20-year Army veteran, confronts that problem with the heavily Shi'ite police unit he works with in this dusty farming community 20 miles southeast of Baghdad. "It is difficult to get people to reconcile when they can't get past 'the National Police are Shi'a and I'm not,'" he said...
...area, tensions between Sunnis and Shi'ites have eased. That assessment is seconded by soldiers like Specialist Benjamin Block, 24. He served two tours in Iraq with the Marine Corps before joining the Army last July. His final trip with the Marines was as part of the unit that took over for Marr's 82nd Airborne in Fallujah. "The area around Fallujah wasn't really secure," Block said. "Wherever we were at, it was safe. But there weren't enough of us to cover that amount of ground...