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Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy: That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had […]

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An artist recreates Gettysburg with a lifelike cyclorama—and the painting changes how many people viewed the battle: “No person should die without seeing this cyclorama,” declared a Boston man in 1885. “It’s a duty they owe to their country.” Paul Philippoteaux’s lifelike depiction of the Battle of Gettysburg was much more than a painting. It […]

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The evolution of how we recruit and train spies—starting with the OSS in the 1940s—and our changing expectations of what the job entails and what motivates those who sign up: I remember him saying something like: “This is the only thing in the Army that you can volunteer for and then get out of if […]

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A family discovers new details about their son’s death in Iraq, and wonders why the U.S. lieutenant responsible was not punished: A year after Dave Sharrett II died, his parents, Vicki and Dave Sr., were nearly at peace. They had come to accept the Army’s explanation of how it all happened in the “fog of […]

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[Fiction, not single-page] Life as a soldier in the Israeli Defense Force, and a trip to the tear-gas tent: “Do you love the army?” my commander asks. “Yes and no, I mean I definitely believe that it is important in a country like ours to serve in the army, but I hope for peace, and […]

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Four Western journalists and a former Army Ranger-turned-counterinsurgency expert arrange a paintball game with members of the Shiite militant group, with the hopes of learning more about what motivates them: It took nearly a full year to pull together this game, and all along I’d been convinced that things would fall apart at the last […]

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How Moammar Gadhafi’s regime built a surveillance network called the Electric Army that captured all Internet traffic going in and out of Libya, and how dissidents fought back. Gwaider’s favored method, like that of Kevin Mitnick, the famous American hacker he admired, was “social engineering,” which meant tricking the victims into giving up access themselves. […]

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Can we discover the impact of war on a soldier before they’re sent out to fight? And what does that mean for ethics and liability when it comes to addressing PTSD? Brian had spent part of his career at nearby Fort Hood, and in 2007 he and Telch approached Army leaders at the base about […]

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Consequence

In 2007, Eric Fair wrote an article in the Washington Post describing his experience as an interrogator in Iraq. He has had trouble finding a way to move on. I tell my professor I am sick. I put away verb charts, participles, and lexicons, board a train for Washington, D.C., and meet with Department of […]

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How the upcoming Mexican presidential election could impact the drug war in cities like Guadalajara: Weary of pantallas, I tried to get to the bottom of a single bust—the ‘historic’ meth-lab raid in Tlajomulco that confiscated some four billion dollars’ worth of drugs. Were the drugs seized really worth that much? Well, no. The more […]

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