Sending youth to war
While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on December 1, 2009. David Wood captures the heartbreak of sending to war young men who only recently were boys: I sometimes ...
While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on December 1, 2009.
David Wood captures the heartbreak of sending to war young men who only recently were boys:
I sometimes forget how young they are. A few years ago, I was lazing in the dust with a bunch of Marines during a break in training. Already combat veterans, they were about to deploy back to Iraq. They'd been practicing getting ambushed and killing the ambushers, and now they were chatting about computer games.
While Tom Ricks is away from his blog, he has selected a few of his favorite posts to re-run. We will be posting a few every day until he returns. This originally ran on December 1, 2009.
David Wood captures the heartbreak of sending to war young men who only recently were boys:
I sometimes forget how young they are. A few years ago, I was lazing in the dust with a bunch of Marines during a break in training. Already combat veterans, they were about to deploy back to Iraq. They’d been practicing getting ambushed and killing the ambushers, and now they were chatting about computer games.
"Hey, did’ja ever get ‘Gears of War’?" asked Louis Duran, 19.
"Nah, I was gonna," said his buddy, Steven Aspling, 20, "but my mom wouldn’t let me."
More from Foreign Policy

Is Cold War Inevitable?
A new biography of George Kennan, the father of containment, raises questions about whether the old Cold War—and the emerging one with China—could have been avoided.

So You Want to Buy an Ambassadorship
The United States is the only Western government that routinely rewards mega-donors with top diplomatic posts.

Can China Pull Off Its Charm Offensive?
Why Beijing’s foreign-policy reset will—or won’t—work out.

Turkey’s Problem Isn’t Sweden. It’s the United States.
Erdogan has focused on Stockholm’s stance toward Kurdish exile groups, but Ankara’s real demand is the end of U.S. support for Kurds in Syria.