Best Defense
Thomas E. Ricks' daily take on national security.

Coming home to trouble

Good NYT piece on the troubles of an Army unit (4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division) coming home from Iraq to Fort Bliss, Texas. Grabber lines: …given the brigade’s record at Fort Bliss of suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, its troops are statistically at greater risk at home than while deployed in Iraq. ...

By , a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy.
U.S. Army
U.S. Army
U.S. Army

Good NYT piece on the troubles of an Army unit (4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division) coming home from Iraq to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Good NYT piece on the troubles of an Army unit (4th Brigade, 1st Armored Division) coming home from Iraq to Fort Bliss, Texas.

Grabber lines:

…given the brigade’s record at Fort Bliss of suicide, murder, assault, drunken driving and drug use, its troops are statistically at greater risk at home than while deployed in Iraq. During the past year, only one of the unit’s soldiers died in combat, but in 2008, the last time the brigade was home from Iraq, seven soldiers were killed and six others committed crimes in which at least four civilians and soldiers from outside the brigade died in a little more than a year.

Drugs, including heroin and a methamphetamine lab, were discovered in the barracks, as was a homemade sex tape that had been circulating among soldiers and that featured one of the brigade’s female lieutenants and five male sergeants."

Thomas E. Ricks is a former contributing editor to Foreign Policy. Twitter: @tomricks1

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