So this is how we maintain an all-volunteer army?
Stories about the fraud, pressure tactics, and baiting practiced by military recruiters are legion.  But even if they have a soft touch recruiters may have an unfair advantage over teenagers (not known for their skilled assessment of long-term consequences).  Imagine: your son’s public school welcomes in a [...]

We still haven’t quite figured out how to take care of our troops at home and Ed Frawley is just more proof. Frawley, whose son was stationed at Fort Bragg in North Carolina after a 15-month tour of Afghanistan, caught the base’s ongoing squalor on camera: soldiers fighting standing sewage, rows of broken toilets, broken [...]

Yesterday the LA Times ran a harrowing Op-Ed by Rep. Jane Harman on the rape epidemic in the military. Says Harman:
In 2006, 2,947 sexual assaults were reported — 73% more than in 2004. The DOD’s newest report, released this month, indicates that 2,688 reports were made in 2007, but a recent shift from calendar-year reporting [...]

Suicide rates go up 20%, while attempted suicide/self-injury rates jump sixfold

More details to be found here.

Ernesto Guerra joined the Army to make a home for his family in America. Two years after his death in Iraq, Ernesto lies in a Mexican cemetery, his mother grieves and his 12-year-old brother is a target of Army recruiters combing the streets of Long Beach
By Rachel Powers
ACCURATE, TIMELY, IN PERSON
When a U.S. Army soldier [...]