Published in the The Appeal. By Olivia Heffernan Three Bronx friends recount their 2012 arrests in the NYPD‘s ‘Operation Crew Cut,’ experiences with the court system, incarceration and lives seven years later. At approximately 4 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2012,…
Category: America’s Wars
Marching to Competency
BY MICHAEL LARSON Staff Sergeant Joseph Pratt arrived at Forward Operating Base Tiger in the middle of August 2005 for an inglorious assignment but one on which America’s exit strategy from Afghanistan hinged: for two weeks, he would train Afghan…
Risks for Afghan Journalists Grow
BY ANNA KORDUNSKY Sangar Rahimi, an Afghan reporter who works for The New York Times in Kabul, likes to be the first to arrive on the scene. In early October 2001, long before he even became a journalist, he and…
Vets at Columbia, Then and Now
BY LAUREN SCHULZ In 1968, the Vietnam War was raging and so was Columbia University. Anti-war students ransacked the ROTC barracks and a year later, the program was banned from campus. Fights broke out on campus over the war. Students…
Riding MSR Tampa
BY ASHOKA MUKPO In the summer of 2006, Army Sergeant Devin F. Muir departed from his base near Al-Hillah for a patrol in the sweltering heat of central Iraq. A year earlier, being involved in the war had not been…
Hard Opportunities
BY MIMI WELLS Ayesha was thirteen years old when her parents gave her to a forty-year old man to settle a blood debt between their families in accordance with a Pashtun custom known as “baad.” The man…
One at a Time
BY MIMI WELLS Specialist Mathew “Doc” Kenney sat in the backseat of the third heavily armored MRAP, near the window. It was around midnight on Easter Sunday, 2009, and the four-car convoy was returning home from escorting a group of…
An IED on MSR Tampa
BY ASHOKA MUKPO In the summer of 2006, Army Sergeant Devin F. Muir departed from his base near Al-Hillah for a patrol in the sweltering heat of central Iraq. A year earlier, being involved in the war had not been…
Can Afghanistan Police Itself?
BY REBECCA WEXLER NEW YORK—Seeking new ways to speed the withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, General Petraeus recently announced a massive expansion of the Afghan Local Police, a community policing initiative touted as the “new way forward” in winning…
ROTC at Columbia?
BY LAUREN SCHULZ New York – Short black hair, petite build, arms at her side, wearing a pressed white shirt and long skirt, Edith Parks, from the School of Continuing Education, stepped up to the microphone after waiting her turn…