Soldier

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.

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.

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.

The bloody mayhem allegedly committed by a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan Sunday couldn't have come at a worse time. The killings, which left up to 16 Afghan civilians dead, are likely to inflame an already tense situation fueled by growing Afghan resentment over the presence of U.S. and NATO troops in their country. Recent weeks have seen an upsurge in anti-American protests erupting into violence againstU.S. military and diplomatic personnel. American officials need to find out the circumstances of the latest killings as quickly as possible and make the results public.