War Zone

Mothers cry, cameras rollLives go onThe list of don'ts grows longDon't sit on your stepsDon't go out night or dayDon't play inside or outYou will have no protectionHere in BaltimoreYour blood could flowAnd cameras will roll

April, in these parts, is irresistibly transformative. Vibrant life and color rise up and relentlessly overwhelm a drab winter's landscape, inspiring notions in the human heart of renewal and redemption. And with it comes another baseball season and all its manifestations of new beginnings and the grand possibilities that await in the lush green days ahead. So it was supposed to be 45 years ago. 1968 had dawned with the stunning reports of the Tet Offensive, a sobering reality that stretched deep into March, concluding with a sitting president declining to seek re-election, and bringing to us a reluctant familiarity with places called Khe Sanh, Hue, Lang Vei and My Lai. Our weariness longed for April's explosion of daffodils, bright green leaves, and baseball.

KHOBAR, Saudi Arabia -- Like the elusive desert oasis that evaporates in the imagination and then reappears moments later, life in a war zone is full of deceptions and surprises.Iraqi tanks pretend to surrender and then blast their way into a deserted Saudi border town. U.S. pilots attack mobile Scud missile launchers only to find they've hit decoys.With some regularity, Army scouts are telling of nights when the enemy troop movements they were watching turned out to be a wandering herd of camels.

If you had told me in 2000 that I could find something to admire about President George W. Bush, I would have been astounded. Yet in 2003, when he traveled in secret to Iraq to share Thanksgiving dinner with the soldiers in the war zone, I greatly admired his action. At the time, there wasn't a visitor to Iraq with more of a target on his back. He was not only absent from his own table on the holiday, he put his life in danger to do it. Now, in 2012, I am ecstatic that President Barack Obama has been re-elected.

MIAMI -- Laurice Smith didn't know what else to do, so sh decided to run a hoe across her kitchen floor.The hoe was for the mess left behind after Hurricane Andrew ripped through southern Florida, killing at least 11 people with its 160-mph gusts of wind. Mrs. Smith raked up the remnants of the storm's fury: a soggy pile of newspapers, broken glass, attic insulation and a small white phone."I have to do something," Mrs. Smith said. "We did not know where to start."She could have started anywhere in what was left of her two-story yellow house.

Military analogies are inevitable.Norman P. Blake Jr., chairman of USF&G Corp., returned from South Florida on Tuesday evening, shaking his head over the destruction he witnessed from the nation's costliest natural disaster. "It's like in a war zone," he said.Mr. Blake's purpose was to review his troops, boost the morale of a few dozen people working under exhausting conditions and meet with customers whose lives have been disrupted. "I walked away from there saying, 'God, the courage and capacity of these people to maintain their dignity,' " he said in an interview this week.

NEW YORK -- A United Nations aid agency yesterday accused Sudan's Islamic fundamentalist government of banning food flights to a beleaguered rebel-held war zone, threatening hundreds of thousands with starvation and death.Holding up a photograph of a child with a bloated abdomen and matchstick legs, Catherine Bertini, executive director of the U.N.'s World Food Program, said:"When people look like this, and more and more children are dying any decision not to allow food to reach them is cruel."

Corean Humphrey spread out a quilt last winter and for two months slept on the floor. She was afraid she'd get shot if she slept in her bed."People talk about having a war in Saudi Arabia," says Humphrey, who lives two blocks south of Bon Secours Hospital. "We were having a war right here on Pulaski and Hollins Street."They shot through my kitchen door. They shot through my neighbor's window . . . I didn't sleep in my bed on account of people shooting. By my windows being low they could have shot through the windows and hit me in bed."

Balad Air Base, Iraq -- The boy was dying much faster now. His blood pressure had skyrocketed, and his pulse was in the 180s. Standing at the foot of his bed, Dr. Heather Cereste could see his heart shudder in his skinny chest. His father seemed to sense what was coming. It was past midnight, Heather would later recall, and he was still at the bedside of his 6-year-old, who had been shot in the head while playing outside his Baghdad home. The father had been waiting this way for several days, dressed in the same black robe, stroking the boy's shaved head or resting his own head on the child's legs.

The morning after Baltimore police visited 48 drinking establishments as part of a new nightclub enforcement initiative, residents near one bar in West Baltimore awoke to a spray of gunfire that left two men dead and two others wounded. All four suffered multiple gunshot wounds in what police say may have been a drive-by shooting about 7:30 a.m. yesterday outside 2-Spot Bar at Wheeler Avenue and Calverton Road. None of the victims had been identified yesterday. Police Commissioner Kevin P. Clark said yesterday morning's violence underlines the problem with bars and clubs that stay open until 5 a.m. "These things aren't happening outside somebody's house," Clark said yesterday.

I live in northern Baltimore and was without electricity for a week after the recent storm. Our neighborhood looked like a war zone, with trees and power lines down on almost every street. But not once did I or my neighbors get mad at BGE because we realized the scope of destruction caused by the derecho and what a mammoth job the cleanup was going to be. Now the politicians are puffing up their chests and damning BGE to make it look like they are doing something. The dialogue has become an either-or discussion about whether or not to put power lines underground, which would cost a fortune.

As a resident of the Inner Harbor, I'm shocked by the details of what happened downtown duringSt. Patrick's Day weekend ("The St. Patrick's Day brawl," May 16). And I was also dismayed by how quickly the brawl apparently materialized. However, I'm grateful Maryland's Public Information Act made it possible for your reporter to unravel details as they were happening in real time. I'm just sorry city officials downplayed this violence as it leads to citizen complacency until something serious occurs.

As a resident of the Inner Harbor, I was shocked to read the details surrounding the St. Patrick's Day "mayhem" ("St. Patrick's Day violence exceeded initial reports, police dispatch tapes show," May 13). I appreciate The Sun report and Peter Hermann 's excellent investigative journalism. Your front page story, accompanied by extensive play-by-play transcripts, was impressive. Also, I'm grateful Maryland's Public Information Act makes it possible to finally learn the details. Perhaps our city government would rather have had the whole sorry matter swept under the carpet.

A Johns Hopkins bioethicist joined other government and health officials in calling on the U.S. Congress to do more to protect doctors in war zones such as Syria. In recent remarks to Congress, Leonard Rubenstein, a bioethicist at Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics specializing in protection of human rights in areas of conflict, said violations of medical neutrality must have consequences. “Adherence to norms won't take place unless it becomes a diplomatic priority, with the U.S. and other states using their considerable leverage to demand adherence to international law,” he said in a prepared statement.

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Basketball coaches began noticing John Crowder when he was in sixth grade. By eighth grade, he stood 6 foot 7, was still growing and was ranked nationally. This spring he attracted the attention of college coaches along the Eastern Coast. But in an all-too-familiar Baltimore story, a promising future for the forward from Our Lady of Mount Carmel High School vanished during an overnight shooting. Police found the 17-year-old bleeding in a yard in Northeast Baltimore about 1 a.m. Monday.

Life along this section of Harford Road changed very little this week, despite the sea of blue uniforms and the white squad cars that stayed for days. Business went on. A pastor held his regular prayer service. A jogger kept to his daily run. The drug dealing resumed. But near the spot where Baltimore Police Agent Michael J. Cowdery Jr. was shot dead Monday night, Shirley Jones stood sweeping away surgical gloves left in the street - by medics or investigators - near where the gunman's body fell.

CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. - The tan combat boots were back on the porch where they belonged, near a soccer ball and toy truck. After seven months, Army Staff Sgt. Dwayne Stone had come home from Iraq to see his wife and son and a 5-month-old baby girl he had never held. But on his first night back at the roomy brick rancher, after the children were asleep, Deiry Stone cried as the couple lay under a flowery comforter. In two weeks, her husband would have to go back to the war zone, and she dreaded it already.

In my job I get books sent to me by publishers and authors looking for publicity. I read some of them, skim through others and often talk with the authors on my show. About this time every year, there are requests from listeners who want to know what books I would consider worthy of reading. Liberals won't be thrilled with some of my recommendations, but then I wouldn't much cotton to theirs, either. Here are my 2009 book recommendations: "Economics in One Lesson" by Henry Hazlitt.

Logistics will be the key to introducing 30,000 soldiers and Marines into Afghanistan in the next six to seven months, and to confronting the Taliban over the next 18 months. This reflects an old saying in the military: Amateurs study strategy, and professionals study logistics. Nevertheless, no one on the Senate and House Armed Services and Foreign Affairs committees last week asked either Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates or Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen about the significant logistics problems they will face in Afghanistan.