Army U S

The lanky 19-year-old from South Korea has lived in the Southland since he was 9 years old. He is as comfortable speaking English as his native Korean. And he desperately wants to join the Army. Late last week, the teenager walked into a recruiting office in an Eagle Rock mall wearing a pendant shaped like a dog tag around his neck. Until recently, local recruiters would have had to turn him away. His student visa would not have qualified him to enlist.

Inside a futuristic-looking dome that rises from the sandy wasteland of the high Mojave Desert, soldiers in plywood cubicles work at computers powered by solar panels and a towering wind turbine. Plug-in cars shuttle the troops across the vast expanses here at Ft. Irwin in San Bernardino County. At night, tents lined with insulating foam provide a cool retreat at the end of a 100-degree day.

Before soldiers leave on missions in Iraq or Afghanistan, they often are ordered to do everything in their power to bring their buddies back. "Leave no man behind" is the motto. But does that military ethos apply to soldiers heading out for a rowdy weekend in the United States? That question is being raised at an unusual court-martial on this massive Army base, where a young paratrooper who struggled to bring a combative, drunk soldier back to the barracks has been accused of causing his death.

National Guard and reserve forces remain inadequately equipped and unprepared to deal with a wide range of domestic disasters, particularly an attack with unconventional weapons, a congressional commission has concluded. In its final report, the panel said Thursday that congressional and Pentagon policymakers had been reluctant to acknowledge that the military remains the only institution that can respond quickly to natural and man-made disasters.

The leader of an Army sniper team, testifying Friday as one of his soldiers went on trial for murder, said he ordered the sergeant to kill an Iraqi civilian to prevent their clandestine unit from being discovered. Testimony by Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley appeared to boost the defense of Sgt. Evan Vela, the last of three snipers to face a court-martial for actions last year southwest of Baghdad. Hensley and Spc. Jorge G. Sandoval Jr.

Army Sgt. Evan Vela held back tears as he said at his court-martial Saturday that he had killed an Iraqi man who had stumbled into his sniper team's camp. Vela told the court on the second day of his trial that his superior officer, Staff Sgt. Michael A. Hensley, ordered him to shoot the Iraqi. "I thought he was going to let him go," said Vela, who is charged with murder, planting a weapon and making false statements. "I heard the word 'shoot.' My next memory is the man was dead.

More than a quarter-century after his death and 56 years after he single-handedly took out three enemy machine-gun nests in the Korean War, Army Master Sgt. Woodrow Wilson Keeble was awarded the Medal of Honor on Monday -- the first Sioux to receive the nation's top decoration for bravery in battle.

Under pressure to meet combat needs, the Army and Marine Corps brought in significantly more recruits with felony convictions last year than in 2006, including some with manslaughter and sex-crime convictions. Data released by a congressional committee shows the number of soldiers admitted to the Army with felony records jumped from 249 in 2006 to 511 in 2007. And the number of Marines with felonies rose from 208 to 350.

When Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno began his second tour of duty in Iraq late in 2006 as the war's No. 2 commander, he was handed a battle plan that he and his staff quickly determined was out of touch with reality -- a set of precise timetables for handing over whole provinces to Iraqi security forces, regardless of their readiness. "This race to victory based on a timeline did not pass the common-sense test," said a top Odierno aide, citing the threat of widespread violence.

The number of soldiers forced to remain in the Army involuntarily under the military's controversial "stop-loss" program has risen sharply since the Pentagon extended combat tours last year, officials said Thursday. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was briefed about the program by Army officials who said that thousands of new stop-loss orders were issued to keep soldiers from leaving the service after Gates ordered combat tours extended from 12 to 15 months last spring.