With plans in motion to draw down the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 2,500 next month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff defended that decision by outlining the state of the conflict there.

In addition to reaching something of a stalemate, where the Taliban can’t conquer the U.S.-backed Afghan security forces, and the U.S. can’t bring the Taliban to its knees, Army Gen. Mark Milley said Wednesday during a Brookings Institution event, the U.S. has probably done all it can do.

“We believe now that after 20 years, two decades of consistent effort, that we he have achieved a modicum of success,” he said.

Since the first boots hit the ground in October 2001, more than 2,400 American troops have died and nearly 21,000 have been injured, along with close to $1 trillion spent on trying to stabilize Afghanistan enough that it won’t again become a training ground for terrorist groups.

Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller announced on Nov. 17 that forces in that country would draw down from 4,500 to 2,500 by Jan. 15, continuing on a Trump administration plan laid out earlier this year that would bring the number to zero by May.

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Sonja Ruhren vividly recalls that morning 16 years ago. Just days before Christmas, she heard someone pull into her driveway and then knock on her door. A pair of uniformed troops stood on her front porch in Stafford, Virginia. One was a chaplain. Confused, she invited them in out of the cold. They appeared painfully uncomfortable. It took them a while to finally explain why they were there. They had come to talk to her about her only child, Davey, her best friend, her “Golden Boy,” the sensitive, generous, forgiving son with green eyes she raised as a single mother. He was gone. Killed in Iraq.

Smoldering with red hot rage, she ordered the troops out of her house. Her anger with the U.S. military gave way to grief in the days that followed, sorrow so suffocating that just summoning the will to climb out of bed in the morning became a struggle. The day she lost Davey, Dec. 21, can be especially painful each year.

“Sometimes, December 21 comes and I am numb. It doesn’t register with me,” she told me. “And then sometimes it comes and it just takes the wind out of me — it completely just knocks me on the ground. And there are times when December 21 comes and I am OK, but then the next day it slaps me really, really hard. Really hard.”

On that day in 2004, a suicide bomber infiltrated a sprawling U.S. military base in northern Iraq, walked into the bustling mess tent there at the busiest part of lunchtime and detonated his explosives. The deafening blast killed 23 people. Among the dead were the bomber, Ruhren’s son, 13 other U.S. troops, four civilian contractors and four Iraqi soldiers. Dozens of others were injured.

The bombing at Forward Operating Base Marez in Mosul was the single deadliest attack on a U.S. military installation during the war in Iraq, according to icasualties.org, which tracks troop fatalities. It made headlines around the world. On the day of the bombing, President George W. Bush trained his focus on grieving loved ones like Sonja Ruhren, telling reporters: “We pray for them. We send our heartfelt condolences to the loved ones who suffer today.”

I narrowly survived the attack.

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From instant coffee to Cheetos, packaged cookies and energy bars, the U.S. military helped invent many of the snacks Americans love to eat.

“There was a tremendous need for the military to develop modern rations, and it ended up not only inventing a bunch of new food processing techniques but putting in place a food science research system that exists to this day,” says food writer Anastacia Marx de Salcedo, author of “Combat-Ready Kitchen: How the U.S. Military Shapes the Way You Eat”. “Out of that came a lot of new techniques and food, and after the war, those were incorporated into snack and convenience foods.”

Those new techniques include high pressure processing, which makes uncooked food safe to eat. The process is routinely used in packaged foods like guacamole, salsa and hummus.

Cheetos, one of America’s favorite cheesy, crunchy snacks, are made possible by the dehydration process the military worked on to remove the water from cheese. That gave cheese both a longer shelf life and made it lighter to transport to troops overseas.

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The Army has started testing recruits for sickle cell trait, or SCT, to identify at-risk Soldiers, as the service plans to screen all Soldiers within a year, according to a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command medical officer.

Earlier this month, the screening push kicked off to both give Army leaders an idea of how SCT has impacted the ranks, and to help Soldiers combat the lifelong ailment, said Maj. Sean Donohue, command surgeon at TRADOC’s Center for Initial Military Training.

“On the enlisted side, recruits [at basic combat training] are now tested as part of their initial screening exam,” Donohue said. The SCT tests are grouped in “with a variety of other blood samples as part of initial processing.”

Since Nov. 2, roughly 2% of recruits have been diagnosed with the blood disorder, he said, a number on par with the national average.

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