There was little possibility that the frail Syrian woman in her 70s could make the arduous, illegal trek across the steep, mountainous territory separating Syria from Turkey, but she nonetheless stood with a few young men who were hiding on the Syrian side, waiting for a Turkish soldier to move away from an opening in the coiled razor wire before dashing through it. After about a half an hour, she gave up. "My daughter," she told me, "can ...

"Wanted: Employment as mercenary on full-time or job contract basis. Preferably in South or Central America, but anywhere in the world if you pay transportation. Contact Gearhart, Box 1457, Wheaton, Md. 20902." That ad appeared last January in Soldier of Fortune, a magazine aimed at military buffs and mercenaries. It got Daniel Gearhart, 34, a Viet Nam veteran who was deeply in debt from family medical bills, a job the next month as a mercenary in the Angolan civil war. ...

The Syrian colonel sat cross-legged on a patch of moist soil, in a borrowed plaid shirt and pale green trousers, surrounded by dozens of men who had fled from the besieged northern Syrian city of Jisr al-Shughour to an orchard a few hundred meters from the Turkish border. He says his name is Hussein Harmoush, and shows TIME a laminated military ID card indicating that and his title. Everyone around calls him moqadam, the Arabic for his ...

The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad doesn't make threats lightly. And as they confronted the uprising in the town of Jisr al-Shughour, government security forces were blunt, according to the medical staff in area's small hospitals and the local Red Crescent outpost there. Saving a wounded protester's life could cost them their own. As a result, private medical clinics closed and doctors in the northern Syrian town's public hospital fled. Of 200 Red Crescent volunteers, only ...

TITLE: A MURDER IN WARTIME AUTHOR: JEFF STEIN PUBLISHER: ST. MARTIN'S PRESS; 414 PAGES; $22.95 THE BOTTOM LINE: This is the best military morality tale since The Caine Mutiny. CAPTAIN ROBERT MARASCO, WHO pulled the trigger, said the bullet that killed Thai Khac Chuyen made the sound of a "tire puncture" and splattered "blood, skull and bits of brain" on him and the other two Green Berets in the boat. Undaunted, the trio rolled the body of the alleged North ...

Getting pummeled by three men with kicks, punches and jabs is not how I typically spend my vacation. Yet there I was on Military Base 8 defending myself from a trio of Israeli attackers. But my assailants — brothers Avi and Shlomi Moyal and Haim Sasson — weren't trying to rob me, they were simply doing their job: training me to protect myself via the increasingly hip Israeli self-defense technique known as Krav Maga. Literally "close contact" in ...

President Barack Obama is about to announce his new strategy for Afghanistan, but the success of whatever option he chooses will depend heavily on Pakistan acting to stop its territory being used to attack Western forces next door. And that's bad news, because the demands of its own domestic counterinsurgency campaign, doubts about the duration of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan and looming political instability in Islamabad have left Pakistan in no hurry to help out. Obama's National ...

The U.S. is not yet at war with Saddam Hussein. Not officially. But quietly, over the past few months, some of its savviest warriors have sneaked into his country. They have been secretly prowling the Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq, trying to organize a guerrilla force that could guide American soldiers invading from the north, hunting for targets that U.S. warplanes might bomb, setting up networks to hide U.S. pilots who might be shot down and mapping out escape routes ...

The black-bearded, Oriental-eyed effigy ablaze before the U.S. embassy in Manila looked more like Charlie Chan than Uncle Sam. But no one could mistake the mood of the 5,000 torch-bearing students, trade unionists and agitators swarming before the embassy gates. Their placards read "Stop fooling us, Yankee dogs!" and "Go home, white monkeys!" The mob shouted not only for immediate removal of all U.S. military bases but also for things clearly beyond U.S. control, including an increase in the minimum wage . Then a soft rain began ...

In an open lot on the Dhubat al-Saff military base, a group of Libyan rebel recruits gathers around an instructor demonstrating how to fire a Russian-made ZU-23-2 quad-barrel antiaircraft gun. At the far edge of the same lot, another trainer shows his students how to calibrate a mortar. But while the camp's instructors explain the technical specifications of their assorted weapons, Jerry Erwin of Vancouver, Wash., is teaching the recruits how to survive on the battlefield. "One, ...