CLARIFICATION APPENDED Written last month, this straightforward account of life in Iraq by a Marine officer was initially sent just to a small group of family and friends. His honest but wry narration and unusually frank dissection of the mission contrasts sharply with the story presented by both sides of the Iraq war debate, the Pentagon spin masters and fierce critics. Perhaps inevitably, the "Letter from Iraq" moved quickly beyond the small group of acquantainaces and hit the ...

The history of Viet Nam is full of heroines. Women often served as gen erals. In the 1st century A.D., the Trung sisters raised an army and started a rebellion against Viet Nam's Chinese overlords; one of their female com manders gave birth to a child on the battlefield, then strapping her infant on her back and brandishing a sword in each hand, led her troops against the Chinese. In 248, a 23-year-old girl put on a suit of golden ...

He is a millionaire many times over but lives in two small, slovenly kept hotel rooms. He travels with the fastest crowd in the country but rarely drinks and never snorts or smokes. He is offered the best jobs in his profession but turns most of them down. His idea of sin is to eat ice cream. His idea of a great time is to talk on the phone. His idea of heaven is to spend hours debating the pros ...

When a reporter from Rupert Murdoch's British Sunday paper the News of the World was jailed, along with a private detective, in 2007 for hacking into the cellphone voicemails of aides to the royal family, the paper insisted it was a one-off — a "rogue reporter" operating without the knowledge or approval of his bosses. That assertion prompted two reactions from those in the U.K. newspaper industry: snorts of disbelief — after all, the British tabloids have ...

In retrospect, Disneyland wasn't an ideal family-vacation spot for Mark Waddell, a Navy SEAL commander whose valor in combat hid the fact that he was suffering from severe mental trauma. The noise of the careening rides, the shrieking kids — everything roused Waddell to a state of hypervigilance typical of his worst days in combat. When an actor dressed as Goofy stuck his long, doggy muzzle into his face, Waddell recalls, "I wanted to grab Goofy by the throat." ...

It's Christmas Eve, 1903, in St. Louis, and some members of the Smith family are anguished about leaving their home for Mr. Smith's new job in New York City. The six-year-old, Tootie

Koji Haga wasn't just near the tsunami that devastated northern Japan on March 11. He was on top of it. Somehow the fishing-boat captain kept his pitching vessel upright as the churning force of the wave attacked the shore, turning his coastal community of Akaushi into a graveyard of rubble and probably killing upwards of 10,000 people in the country's north. I met him barely 24 hours after he'd returned to the spot where his house once ...

If you're like most computer users, your PC or Mac is loaded with a gazillion family photos and other prized documents. Some of you may be sleeping peacefully believing that the external hard drive you picked up at Costco is backing up your data every night, but have you ever checked to see if it's configured correctly? What's really going on inside that black box? And what would happen if your house caught fire? One high-tech — and ...

On Tuesday, the counter at the Web site Free the Hikers was at 88 days.Switzerland's ambassador to Iran paid the three a consular visit in September and said they were in good condition, but they have had no direct contact with relatives, the families said in a news release. Switzerland handles U.S. consular matters in Tehran, as the United States and Iran have no diplomatic relations. The Americans entered northern Iraq from Turkey on July 28 during a planned ...

Correction Appended: Oct. 19, 2009 It's hard to feel sorry for America's family doctors. Any job that averages $179,000 per year and lets you be your own boss is a job most folks wouldn't turn down. With the effort to rein in health-care costs increasingly framed as an unhappy trade-off in which insurers either slash benefits or raise premiums, some in Washington are beginning to ask a question long considered off-limits: Do we simply pay doctors too much The ...