Lost in Translation: The challenges of training GIs to avoid insulting – and shooting – Iraqi civilians

2nd Battalion 4th Marine Regiment was at the Marine Corps’ enormous Twentynine Palms base for a month long combat-and-culture training package called Mojave Viper. The exercise merges traditional training and a brand-new series of simulations and classes for Iraq-bound Marines, with an emphasis on evoking the intensity of actual combat in a credibly simulated Iraqi village.

The Bomb Squad: Their job: Hunt down and disarm the explosive booby traps that kill more Americans than any other weapon. Try not to die doing it.

This article annoyed me, the way mosquitos annoy you during an otherwise lovely outdoor event. It was good, don’t get me wrong, a good story about Army soldiers who spend their days hunting for and disarming IEDs. But the author oddly chose to crack jokes throughout the article, like going from a quote about one soldier describing how his friend got blown up to musing about how the scenery in Iraq was similiar to Kansas…except that Kansas would have “come along quietly.” Just bugged me.

When the War Comes Home: For a Marine Reserve Company That Saw Death in Iraq, Returning to Life in Ohio Is an Unexpected Battle

“In a series of conversations over the past year, more than a dozen Marines of Lima Company shared their experiences of Iraq and their reentry into the United States. Pieced together, scenes from their recent lives sketch a world of in-between, a landscape inhabited not only by them but also by countless others among the roughly 1 million military personnel who have returned from Iraq or soon will. The survivors made it home from the war, but they brought the war with them.”

This one also has a really good photo gallery with audio interviews: When the War Comes Home. I liked the blurriness of a lot of the photographs. I also kept seeing people that looked familiar but they just remind me of other Marines I’ve met before…