She won't head into ground combat as an infantry Marine anytime soon, but she is heading into the Corps' all-male infantry training school this March, the first of two to do so since the Pentagon last week lifted its ban on women in combat roles.
The Army stepped to the fore last month, winning one of the armed forces' most coveted commands after having seen Marine Corps generals selected in recent years to head operations in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Europe.
I was 17. We were in the last weeks of Marine boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. Our platoon was drilling, marching ramrod straight, shoulders back, heels crashing into the parade-ground crushed rock, our drill instructor calling the cadence in that hard nasal singsong. Suddenly he gave us a halt, a right face and a parade rest.
A former U.S. Marine who saw combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan was scheduled Friday for release from a prison in Mexico where he has been held without action since August on a questionable gun charge, according to an aide with the Mexican embassy.
Female Marine officers are unlikely to join the infantry anytime soon, in part because of a lack of volunteers for the Marine Corps' Infantry Officer Course, which was opened to women in September.
A Mexican national who pleaded guilty in the fatal shooting of a U.S. Border Patrol agent — whose 2010 death led to a congressional probe of the botched "Fast and Furious" gunrunning operation — was part of a group of five Mexicans armed with semiautomatic assault rifles who were "patrolling" north of the U.S.-Mexico border with the intent to "intentionally and forcibly assault" U.S. border agents.
A Mexican national charged in the killing of a U.S. Border Patrol agent during a December 2010 gunfight along the Arizona-Mexico border pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Tucson.
President Obama has nominated Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, to be the next NATO supreme allied commander.
After an eight-month investigation, three Marines were punished Monday for urinating on dead Taliban terrorists in a video that spread through the Internet in January.
