Josh Rushing, the former Marine and Control Room star turned Al-Jazeera English reporter, spent nearly his entire adult life around combat gear. But a week ago, he seemed a bit uneasy with the pile of brand-new body armor piled in a corner of his downtown Washington office. He fingered the bright-blue canvas over the heavy Read More
Sam Mendes’ Jarhead, from a screenplay by William Broyles Jr., based on the book by Anthony Swofford, begins with a U.S. Marine Corps basic-training sequence reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), though without a character as profanely hilarious as Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (played by former real-life drill instructor R. Lee Ermey), with his Read More
My friend Elizabeth told me the other day that she had received a phone call from the United States Marines. They weren’t interested in her but in her son, Garrett, who is a recent high-school graduate currently absorbed in taking the exam for his journeyman’s plumber license. She said that she told the Marines not Read More
Henry Adams lobbied for the Spanish-American War for years, ghosting speeches for key Senators, plotting with fellow hawks like Theodore Roosevelt, even visiting Cuba, Spain’s prize possession in the Western Hemisphere. But once the guns went off, he lost interest in the details, assuming that the United States would win through an application of overwhelming Read More
No one who knew Dimitrios Gavriel, 29, was surprised when he joined the Marines, even though it seemed an unlikely choice for an Ivy League–educated Manhattan research analyst. In 1998, just a few months after moving to New York City, Mr. Gavriel had written in his diary: “I feel like I’m swimming in a sea Read More
When the American-Iraqi joint community-policing initiative involves a Humvee of Marines hurtling through the streets of Baghdad to apprehend a runaway police car, the U.S. non-occupation of Iraq is not going 100 percent smoothly.
The initiative was aimed at curtailing the carnival of plunder that is the all-too-liberated Iraqi capital; a place that is Read More
On the afternoon of Oct. 12, as journalists around the country braced themselves for anthrax mailings, Margaret Braun’s third-floor West Village walkup seemed like the safest possible place to be. The air was filled with a powdery substance that made one cough, but it was merely clouds of confectioners’ sugar. Ms. Braun is the city’s Read More
This newspaper appears on newsstands on June 6; like Dec. 7,
it is a date that some of us assume every fresh-faced school child associates
with the war from which there is no escape. Even if the schools believe that
this kind of knowledge is not helpful in the self-esteem-building process, the
kids could hardly Read More
