Iraq War 2003

You might think Raymond Anthony had already done enough for his country. During four tours in Vietnam with the Marine Corps, Anthony was wounded six times. He bears a long bayonet scar on his face. He was shot in the chest with an enemy AK-47, strafed by jets and blown out of a landing craft by North Vietnamese artillery.

In a country where ritual apologies are offered for the slightest offense, Nobutaka Watanabe is having none of it. A wide swath of Japanese public opinion blames Watanabe and four other former hostages released by Iraqi insurgents for bringing their troubles upon themselves -- and wants to hear them say they're sorry for the kidnappings that swiftly turned into a national trauma.

Precede Nine hundred and seventy-five men invading a city of 5 million sounded audacious, or worse, to the U.S. troops assigned the mission outside Baghdad last April 6. Ten years earlier, in Mogadishu, outnumbered American soldiers had been trapped and killed by Somali street fighters. Now some U.S. commanders, convinced the odds were far better in Iraq, scrapped the original plan for taking Baghdad with a steady siege and instead ordered a single bold thrust into the city.

The families of U.S. soldiers killed in action or in accidents during the Iraq war are eligible for death benefits that could range from $250,000 to more than $800,000. The benefits are generally extended to the people who would have relied on the service member's income for economic security, and some can endure for the lifetime of the survivor. Dependent children are eligible for additional compensation, although many of those benefits are terminated if a surviving spouse remarries.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney waded into another roiling public debate Monday, saying he supports same-sex marriage as long as the issue is decided by states rather than the federal government. Cheney, whose youngest daughter has a longtime lesbian partner, said at the National Press Club that "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish."

Fiercely defending the intelligence community, CIA Director George J. Tenet on Thursday said his agency never warned President Bush that Saddam Hussein's government posed an "imminent threat," and the top spymaster backed away from several claims about weapons of mass destruction that the White House had used to justify the invasion of Iraq.

In a cavernous factory in central Vermont, it fell to Ben Smith to render the final honor for Michael Yury Tarlavsky. The Army captain's father and grandfather had been soldiers in Russia, and Tarlavsky continued the tradition by enlisting straight out of college. He had risen to the rank of captain in the Special Forces, fought in Afghanistan and was on his second tour in Iraq last month when his unit came under fire in Najaf.

Shortly after the first Marines were killed in Iraq, a reporter called the military base in Twentynine Palms and asked Sgt. Jennie Haskamp of the public affairs office if she would issue an e-mail each time a Marine from there is killed in combat. As the public face of the Marine Corps, Haskamp's job is to handle such queries tactfully. But the request that death notices be sent out like stock quotes touched a nerve, and she tore into the reporter.

The Milky Way arcs overhead: a sweep of stars so vivid as to resemble glitter shot across the bone-dry desert sky. For all its dazzle, though, the galaxy offers barely a flicker of gauzy light to the sand and rock below. In military terms, there is only 1% illumination of the battlefield. Time to go hunting. Time to be hunted. The impending transfer of governing authority over Iraq fades to abstraction for Marines pressing the relentless war against insurgency and terrorism in Iraq.