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Veterans
News Flash
Time
Names 'American Soldier'
As
Person Of The Year
By Joe Burlas
Army News Service
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For
the second time since it started conferring
the honor in 1927, Time magazine has selected
the American Soldier as its Person of the
Year.
Time
announced its 2003 choice Dec. 21. The
American Soldier was first selected as
Time's Person of the Year during the Korean
War in 1950. |
"Look at the covers (of Time) for the past
year and you will see that one-third of them have
to do with the war in Iraq," said Mark Thompson,
Time's Pentagon correspondent. "Our editors
looked at the key figures of the war – Saddam,
Bush, Rumsfeld – and decided they didn't
quite fit. The American Soldier did."
Time
traditionally selects the person or persons that
have been centrally involved in the major
history-making issues of the year for the honor,
Thompson said. Not all past winners were picked
for being good people – Adolf Hilter, 1938;
Josef Stalin, 1939 and 1949; and Ayatollah Khomeini,
1979, for example.
The
editorial article that justifies Time's selection,
Dec. 29, 2003 – Jan. 5, 2004 issue, praises
Soldiers.
"For uncommon skills and service, for the
choices each one of them has made and the ones
still ahead, for the challenge of defending not
only our freedoms but those barely stirring half
a world away, the American Soldier is Time's Person
of the Year," stated the article.
While praising Soldiers, the editorial makes a
break of Soldiers' actions with those of the administration.
It questions the international policy decisions
of its 2000 Person of the Year, President George
W. Bush.
"The unstated promise is that soldiers are
sent to war only as a last resort, to defend their
country from harm," the editorial asserted. "But
while the threat posed by Saddam was chief among
the stated justifications, George W. Bush's war
was always about more than the weapons that have
yet to be found."
The
Person of the Year issue contains a supporting
article, "Portrait of a Platoon," written
by Time correspondents Romesh Ratnesar and Michael
Weisskopf who followed the survey platoon of 2/3rd
Field Artillery Battalion, 1st Armored Division,
for several weeks recently. That story includes
details of almost daily patrols through the streets
of Baghdad, the improvised explosive device ambush
that killed the platoon leader and a grenade attack
that injured both reporters and two Soldiers. Weisskopf
lost a hand Dec. 10 while trying to get rid of
the grenade that was thrown in the High Mobility,
Multi-Purpose Vehicle he was riding.
Another
supporting article, "Families of
Soldiers," tells the survey platoon's stories
through loved ones' eyes – some supportive
of Operation Iraqi Freedom; some not.
Time rounds out it 2003 Person of the Year issue
with a pro and con discussion of reinstating the
draft and personality features of Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
SOURCE:
VNIS
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