Longreads Pick
“I couldn’t draw any officers, so I started working on sergeants. I had nothing against sergeants but that’s all I could get and I went after them until finally I was told all I could attack were civilians and animals. But they even made zebras off limits to me because they had stripes. … As much as I fought the Army while I was here, it wasn’t that the Army did me any harm. It did me good, taught me things about life and gave me freedom to create. The Army gave me an outlet for my work and it was great for me. because of my experiences. Guys I know that are in the most exciting work in the world still look back on their Army life as the happiest time of their lives.”
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Published: Dec 8, 1968
Length: 12 minutes (3,145 words)
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Longreads Pick
She grew up listening to her dad talk about his days in the Army. She knew she wanted to be a soldier too. She spent nearly two decades serving her country with a quiet determination. On September 11, 2001, she went to her office at the Pentagon. “Major John Thurman, who had been sitting two desks down from Karen, lay on the floor and called out to see if anyone else was alive. Only Karen and Bill Ruth answered back. Thurman put his head as close to the floor as he could without burning his face, forced in a deep breath, and stood. He moved some file cabinets to make a path to Karen and then another to pull Ruth to them.” #Sept11
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Published: Aug 22, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,033 words)
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Longreads Pick
For Army Spc. Brushaun Anderson, there was no escaping his torment. The senior noncommissioned officers who ruled his life at a remote patrol base in Iraq ordered him to wear a plastic trash bag because they said he was “dirty.” They forced him to perform excessive physical exercises in his body armor over and over again. They made him build a sandbag wall that served no military purpose. Anderson seemed to take it all in stride. Until New Year’s Day 2010, when the once-eager 20-year-old soldier locked himself inside a portable toilet, picked up his M4 rifle, aimed the barrel at his forehead and pulled the trigger.
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Published: Jun 7, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,232 words)
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Longreads Pick
Osama bin Laden is dead, but the wars he provoked rage on, claiming lives in all kinds of ways. Consider the bizarre case of Phil McDowell, a decorated American soldier who completed his four-year tour of duty but now may be deported from Canada and court-martialed as a deserter. How can you go AWOL when you’re not even in the army anymore?
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Published: May 26, 2011
Length: 24 minutes (6,037 words)
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Longreads Pick
David Packouz and Efraim Diveroli had picked the perfect moment to get into the arms business. To fight simultaneous wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration had decided to outsource virtually every facet of America’s military operations, from building and staffing Army bases to hiring mercenaries to provide security for diplomats abroad. After Bush took office, private military contracts soared from $145 billion in 2001 to $390 billion in 2008. Federal contracting rules were routinely ignored or skirted, and military-industrial giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin cashed in as war profiteering went from war crime to business model. Why shouldn’t a couple of inexperienced newcomers like Packouz and Diveroli get in on the action? After all, the two friends were after the same thing as everyone else in the arms business — lots and lots and lots of money.
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Published: Mar 17, 2011
Length: 43 minutes (10,854 words)
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Longreads Pick
As army sergeant J. D. Salinger hit the beach on D-day, drank with Hemingway in newly liberated Paris, and marched into concentration camps, the hero of The Catcher in the Rye was with him. In an adaptation from his Salinger biography, the author reveals how the war changed both Holden Caulfield and his creator.
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Published: Jan 22, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,138 words)
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Our Desperate, 250-Year-Long Search for a Gender-Neutral Pronoun
I asked a ton of people, and while there were a few in favor of singular “they,” this exchange with my old friend Michael, a San Francisco musician, composer and poet (and executive, by day) is representative:
Me: Do you write “she” for indeterminate pronoun? What do you do at work?
Michael: At work we make ugly constructions to avoid “he.” Every once in a while, somebody uses “she” and it comes off smarmy, in my estimation. Either it’s a slur against women, or it’s giving women a gold star, either of which is annoying.
By Maria Bustillos, The Awl
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The Tyranny of Defense Inc.
For those at the top, the American military profession is that rare calling where retirement need not imply a reduced income. On the contrary: senior serving officers shed their uniforms not merely to take up golf or go fishing but with the reasonable expectation of raking in big money. In a recent e-mail, a serving officer who is a former student of mine reported that on a visit to the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army—in his words, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Military Industrial Complex”—he was “accosted by two dozen former bosses, now in suits with fancy ties and business cards, hawking the latest defense technologies.”
By Andrew J. Bacevich, The Atlantic
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Longreads Pick
For those at the top, the American military profession is that rare calling where retirement need not imply a reduced income. On the contrary: senior serving officers shed their uniforms not merely to take up golf or go fishing but with the reasonable expectation of raking in big money. In a recent e-mail, a serving officer who is a former student of mine reported that on a visit to the annual meeting of the Association of the United States Army—in his words, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Military Industrial Complex”—he was “accosted by two dozen former bosses, now in suits with fancy ties and business cards, hawking the latest defense technologies.”
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Published: Jan 4, 2011
Length: 13 minutes (3,410 words)
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