Soldier

The Department of Defense says a Maryland soldier has died in Afghanistan. Spc. Anthony A. Paci, 30, of Rockville died Thursday from injuries suffered during a vehicle rollover. Paci was assigned to Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state. Paci enlisted in October 2004. He deployed to Iraq from December 2005 to November 2006. Afghanistan was his second deployment. — Associated Press

News Roundup •••• CNN published an extensive and interesting piece about the genre of game commentary videos and its most popular producer, “SeaNanners.” I suppose it depends on the game, but it seems this whole “video games as a spectator sport” thing is gaining some traction. We did it, America. [ CNN ] •••• Domain registration clues have lead folks to discern that box office smash “The Avengers” will get a console tie-in game called “Battle for Earth.” With summer blockbuster tie-ins having a dodgy track record, let's hope this is more than just a platform-style runthrough of the film.

City police were still searching for leads in Sunday night's fatal shooting of a soldier on leave from Afghanistan for Christmas. On Tuesday, police corrected their previous account that Clifford Jamar Williams, 22, was with his wife when he was gunned down on the way back from the supermarket. Donny Moses, a police spokesman, said Williams was alone in his vehicle when an unknown gunman opened fire, and he flagged down a passer-by in the 600 block of S. Wickham Road who called 911. In another development, police have confirmed through surveillance footage that Williams was at an area supermarket before his death.

Before they started snapping pictures, the amateur photographers of the 82nd Airborne Division whose work was recently made famous by the Los Angeles Times had official business to transact: bombings to investigate, corpses to identify, biometric information to collect. Their assignments were expressly visual: inspect, scan, document. It seems that they performed those duties. They got into trouble, however, when they started doing unauthorized visual work, posing for photos with the corpses to which they had been dispatched.

As a Maryland taxpayer and resident, I cringed at Gov. Martin O'Malley's "happy talk" send-off of our National Guard ("Md. Soldiers off to Egypt," March 25). Just when did they sneak Egypt into the military mix anyhow? We're already involved in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — but Egypt, wow, that came as a surprise. I find nothing heartwarming in The Sun's "kissy face" photos of soldiers saying goodbye to their families. The Maryland National Guard was not set up to keep the peace in Egypt.

This is in regard to H.L. Goldstein's assertion, in a letter to the editor published on May 18 in the Towson Times ("America should not feel morally righteous in bin Laden's death"), that the killing of Osama Bin Laden was murder. Mr. Goldstein is simply wrong. Murder is an unlawful malicious killing. Bin Laden was the leader of enemy forces waging war on the United States. He was quite clear about that, even if some Americans are reluctant to view the conflict in those terms.

Like other Anne Arundel Community College students, Dysha Huggins-Hodge spends much of her time immersed in schoolwork. The one difference: Her online coursework can sometimes be interrupted by a warning of a direct-fire attack. Then Huggins-Hodge, an Army staff sergeant stationed in Afghanistan, takes shelter with her fellow soldiers. "And when it's over," she says, "I go back to doing schoolwork. " An Athens, Ga., resident stationed with her family at Fort Meade, Huggins-Hodge has gone from being uninterested in college to excelling in one of AACC's most difficult curriculums, all amid the challenges that come with serving in the military during wartime.

The wife and four children of Maj. Robert J. Marchanti II stood silently before his casket Monday. Their arms were wrapped firmly around one another in a display of family solidarity and devotion for the soldier killed in Afghanistan. Hundreds of mourners, gathered at Trinity Assembly of God Church Monday, witnessed that endearing sight and listened as the family shared their memories and some of Marchanti's many missives to them. "Words cannot express how sad we are today," said Aaron Marchanti, the oldest of three sons, who wore his Baltimore City firefighter's uniform.

A soldier on leave from Afghanistan was shot and killed in Baltimore while on the way back from a grocery store Sunday, according to police. Clifford Jamar Williams, 22, a private stationed at Fort Bragg, N.C., was driving alone when a gunman approached his vehicle and fired several rounds into the driver's side of his 2004 Acura SUV, according to Anthony Guglielmi, the Police Department's chief spokesman. Police had no suspects or a motive in the shooting. Williams enlisted in the Army in February 2008 and was deployed in April to Afghanistan, where he performed maintenance on planes, an Army spokesman told the Associated Press.

In two short weeks, Charles Edward Ridgley Jr., would have been home from Afghanistan, preparing to see his daughter walk across her high school graduation stage. Instead, his family is readying itself for a final goodbye to the fallen Army captain, who was killed by a suicide bomber over the weekend in his first overseas assignment. Media reports say the Taliban have claimed responsibility for the attack Saturday that killed Captain Ridgley and four others. A statement from Fort Richardson says a suicide bomber dressed as a soldier infiltrated the base in the eastern province of Nangarhar.

The Johns Hopkins University will use a $90 million award to form an institute that will help the Army develop lightweight materials to better protect soldiers and vehicles, university officials said Wednesday. The Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute will focus on what happens to protective materials at the moment of intense impact. "Both individuals and governments have become increasingly insecure over the last 10 years or so," said K.T. Ramesh, the professor who will direct the institute.

The American soldier accused of massacring 17 people in a solo rampage on a remote southern Afghanistan village faces multiple charges of murder and attempted murder. Whisked out of the country by the Army, he is now being held at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. With the Afghan government clamoring for justice, nothing less seems appropriate, pending the thorough Army investigation into the horrible episode in which nine of the fatalities are said to have been children and others women. At least six other villagers were wounded.

I am ashamed to admit that my heart aches for Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, and I feel almost nothing for the families of the Afghan men, women and children he is accused of killing. It is alarming, almost horrifying, to realize that I feel this wave of sadness for him and for his wife and two young children but can find no pity for the people he is said to have methodically gunned down. He snapped, I tell myself. He was in his fourth combat tour and had just seen the grave wounds of a comrade, and something inside him just broke apart.

WALKER: Army National Guard Pvt. Tiffany S. Walker has graduated from One Station Unit Training (OSUT) at Fort Leonard Wood, Waynesville, Mo., which included basic military training and advanced individual training (AIT). During basic military training, Walker received instruction in drill and ceremony, weapons qualification, map reading, tactics, military courtesy, military justice, physical fitness, first aid and Army doctrine, history, principles and traditions. During AIT, she completed the military police specialist course to acquire skills to provide combat area support, conduct battlefield circulation control, area security, prisoner of war operations, civilian internee operations and law and order operations.

No idea in American society is more pervasive than the notion that we all owe a debt of gratitude to the young men and women who have volunteered to fight our foreign wars. This nearly universal belief flows from a sense of collective guilt that the veterans of our previous Asian adventure in Vietnam were not welcomed home with appreciation for their sacrifices and were somehow held responsible for America's first losing war. This attitude was especially unfair since many of the participants in that conflict were draftees who had little choice about their service.

The wife and four children of Maj. Robert J. Marchanti II stood silently before his casket Monday. Their arms were wrapped firmly around one another in a display of family solidarity and devotion for the soldier killed in Afghanistan. Hundreds of mourners, gathered at Trinity Assembly of God Church Monday, witnessed that endearing sight and listened as the family shared their memories and some of Marchanti's many missives to them. "Words cannot express how sad we are today," said Aaron Marchanti, the oldest of three sons, who wore his Baltimore City firefighter's uniform.

Pfc. Christopher Pfeiffer, 20, a Westminster soldier accused of deserting his Army unit, is slowly making his way home after paperwork problems threatened to strand him in Kuwait a second time. Pfeiffer's superiors notified him last week that he might be discharged from the Army. They said he failed to return to his unit after coming home over the summer on authorized leave to take care of his sick wife and newborn daughter. Pfeiffer's family said he did everything he could to contact his chain of command and either further extend his leave or make travel arrangements back to Afghanistan.

Three national hotel corporations have agreed to participate in a program that will allow Americans to donate their hotel points to wounded soldiers and their families, Rep. C.A. Dutch Ruppersberger and Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin said Friday. Bethesda-based Marriott Hotels International, the Wyndham Hotel Group and AmericInn have agreed to participate in "Hotels for Heroes," which was created by legislation introduced last year by Ruppersberger and Cardin. "Sometimes the love and support of family is the best medicine to help a wounded warrior recover from his or her injuries," said Ruppersberger, a Baltimore County Democrat and a member of the House Armed Services Committee.

As a psychologist who has spent more than a year in the Middle East, I have been following with great interest the commentary following the massacre in Afghanistan by the U.S. soldier last Saturday ("Killings of 16 appall Afghans," March 12). Almost all of the opinions expressed by leaders, pundits and talk show listeners betray a fundamental cultural myopia. They seek to find the pathology in the individual and not in the wider society. We think that the soldier must suffer combat fatigue from multiple deployments or suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or another mental illness and rush to declare the incident an isolated one of a rogue soldier.