Enlisted

Convincing people to join the Maryland Army National Guard wasn't the issue. The problem lay in the cutthroat culture in the Recruiting and Retention Battalion, where military discipline and bearing took "a back seat to selling" military service to recruits, according to a critical investigative report released yesterday. The report, with hundreds of pages of supporting documents, called one unnamed officer in the battalion "a disaster waiting to happen." In another example, the report criticized hyper-competitive recruiters who looked up the criminal records of candidates coveted by their colleagues in the hopes of knocking the potential soldiers out of contention.

Fort Campbell, Ky. -- A senior enlisted man testified yesterday that he had angrily asked over a military radio why his soldiers had not killed several Iraqi men they had taken into custody during a combat sweep in Iraq last May. Minutes later, three detainees were shot dead. A 101st Airborne Division squad leader, Staff Sgt. Raymond Girouard, is charged with ordering his soldiers to kill the Iraqis. "I don't understand why we have these guys alive!" 1st Sgt. Eric Geressy testified he shouted over the radio shortly before two soldiers in Girouard's squad shot and killed the unarmed Iraqis.

The South Carroll Diversity Roundtable will meet with clergy from about a dozen area churches and the county's only synagogue, enlisting the power of the pulpit toward initiating a dialogue within congregations. The roundtable, which formed in 2004 amid cases of racially motivated vandalism and other incidents, has met with groups to discuss tolerance and respect. But the 12-member roundtable believes that the gathering Thursday at St. Joseph Catholic Community church in Eldersburg is the easiest way to encourage discussion with a greater number of people.

President Theodore Roosevelt said, "The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired in value." We have not behaved well as a nation with respect to some of our most treasured resources - our national parks. Decades of neglect have taken a heavy toll on them. However, thanks to the leadership of Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne and the Bush administration's recently announced National Parks Centennial Initiative - and with the faithful support of park champions in Congress, including Maryland's congressional delegation and thousands of national park visitors and advocates - we have an opportunity to remedy the situation.

Vincent L. Cardinale Sr., a retired letter carrier who survived the Dec. 7, 1941, attack at Pearl Harbor and was later active in Italian-American organizations, died Feb. 3 of lung disease at his Dundalk home. He was 82. Born and raised in Little Italy, he attended St. Michael parochial school and also delivered ice and milk. One day he told his mother he was going out to buy cigarettes. He lied about his age and enlisted in the Army at age 17. He was assigned to the Schofield Barracks at Honolulu.

The clangs of cookie sheets and closing ovens were drowned out by the high-pitched banter of late-night sleepovers: teenage romances, school rivalries. At Calvary United Methodist Church on Saturday, several dozen teenagers had gathered early on a cold morning to raise money for service projects they will take on this summer. The fundraising plan was typical: They were going to sell cookies. What was not typical was that they baked them, too. In a four-hour stretch, the volunteers baked 15,600 cookies, or 1,300 dozen, packaged in a plastic bag with a personalized message.

Naomi Benedict celebrated her 20th birthday at yesterday's Ravens game. Her boyfriend, Gage Rindt, gave her the best birthday gift she could have hoped for: a 1.65-karat diamond engagement ring. About a half-hour before yesterday's game, Rindt, a New Windsor native and sergeant in the Marine Corps, dropped to one knee and proposed to Benedict, also from New Windsor, on the Ravens' sideline. Benedict, who wore a Todd Heap jersey underneath a winter jacket, said yes, but she initially didn't believe what she was seeing from Rindt.

Filmmaker Ian Inaba knew there were hundreds, if not thousands, of Floridians turned away from the polls in 2000. But when he reviewed video from Election Day newscasts, he could find only two testimonials from frustrated voters worthy of a documentary he was making. Inaba realized that network producers had assigned cameramen to trail candidates for most of the day - but not voters. This year, to capture what the 35-year-old Inaba believes is still an incomplete story, he will deploy more than 600 amateur videographers in seven states likely to experience voting problems, including Maryland, to document possible confusion.

Harry Richard Spurrier Jr., a retired Bethlehem Steel Corp. worker and Navy veteran, died of stroke complications Sunday at Laurelwood Care Center in Elkton. The former Essex resident was 87. Mr. Spurrier was born in Baltimore and raised in the Hampden-Woodberry area. He attended city public schools and during the Depression worked in the Civilian Conservation Corps in Glen Rock, Pa. A week after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Mr. Spurrier enlisted in the Navy. Serving on the USS Barnegat, a seaplane tender, as chief supply officer, he traveled during the war years to North Africa, England, Brazil and Iceland.

Too distracted by a desire to follow his father and brother into military service during World War II, John "Joe" Fisher admits he often skipped school as a teenager and wasn't much interested when he did attend class. In 1945, Fisher was 16 and had completed the seventh grade at what is now Randallstown High when his mother, Evelyn, agreed to sign papers that would allow him to enlist in the U.S. Navy -- a year before he would be old enough to enlist on his own. "I wouldn't stay in school," he said last week while he leafed through a manila folder filled with military memories, including photos showing him with a dozen fellow recruits in an engineer school battalion.