Twenty years ago, military reporter Thomas E. Ricks followed a platoon of young Marine recruits through their first year in the Corps. Watching them transition back home after boot camp, he was stunned to see how alienated many of them felt from their previous lives. Realizing that he was seeing their personal experience of the widening gap between military and civilian America, he was inspired to write an article forThe Atlantic describing this divide. “The United States may be in danger of drifting into a situation in which the military is neither well understood nor well used,” Ricks cautioned. That was July of 1997.
Flash forward nearly 20 years, and Ricks’ observations not only proved prescient, but remain exceedingly relevant.
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