Military Glance
In the chaos of an early morning assault on a remote U.S. outpost in eastern Afghanistan, Staff Sgt. Erich Phillips' M4 carbine quit firing as militant forces surrounded the base. The machine gun he grabbed after tossing the rifle aside didn't work either.
When the battle in the small village of Wanat ended, nine U.S. soldiers lay dead and 27 more were wounded. A detailed study of the attack by a military historian found that weapons failed repeatedly at a "critical moment" during the firefight on July 13, 2008, putting the outnumbered American troops at risk of being overrun by nearly 200 insurgents.
Women are far more likely than men to be kicked out of the military under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy against gays in uniform, according to government figures released Thursday that critics said reflect deep-seated sexism in the armed forces.
American soldiers serving in Afghanistan are depressed and deeply disillusioned, according to the chaplains of two US battalions that have spent nine months on the front line in the war against the Taleban.
Israel said Wednesday it would release 20 Palestinian women from its jails in exchange for a videotape of a captured Israeli soldier that would prove that he is alive.
The sick men are Marines, or sons of Marines. All 20 of them were based at or lived at Camp Lejeune, the U.S. Marine Corps' training base in North Carolina, between the 1960s and the 1980s.
The Danish forces claimed that the book, by Thomas Rathsack, could compromise national security because it describes operations in which he was involved in Afghanistan and Iraq.
A 19-year-old man who committed suicide on the Washington, D.C., subway system on Sunday was an Iraq war veteran recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Army officials confirmed.
