Camp Lejeune News

As of Thursday, Dec. 10, 2009, at least 857 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, according to the Defense Department.

The top candidates in next year's Democratic primary race for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina are at odds over President's Obama's decision to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda remains a danger, and the area along the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan is the epicenter of global Islamic extremism, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said at the Foreign Press Center in Washington, DC, according to Jim Garamone of the American Forces Press Service.

In the latest sign of the enduring financial costs of the Afghan war for the United States and other NATO countries, President Hamid Karzai said Tuesday that Afghanistan would not be able to pay for its own security until at least 2024.

General McChrystal, Commander of NATO and U.S. Forces in Afghanistan and Karl Eikenberry, U.S. Ambassador were in front of the Armed Service Committee s elling President Obama's Afghanistan Strategy.

A soldier from the 10th Mountain Division looks through a scope towards the enemy position near Shigal village in eastern Afghanistan on Monday.

Kernan Manion, a psychiatrist who was hired last January to treat Marines returning from war who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and other acute mental health problems borne from their deployments, fears more soldier-on-soldier violence without radical changes in the current soldier health care system.

The Pentagon has announced about 1,500 Marines from Camp Lejeune will leave for Afghanistan later this month.

Congressional Democrats plan to give the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan a chance Tuesday to explain how he will use an emergency infusion of 30,000 U.S. forces and whether he will be able to assure lawmakers that these troops will begin to be brought home in 18 months.

Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Jonathan Andrew Taylor, a member of The Citadel Class of 2009, died Tuesday, Dec.

The dusty bazaar in this remote town in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province was once teeming with Taliban fighters and drug smugglers who used it as a central transit point in their journeys to and from nearby Pakistan.

The Pentagon says about 16,000 U.S. troops will go into Afghanistan in the first wave of the new surge approved by President Barack Obama.

Staff Sgt. Luis Agostini of Haverstraw, a combat correspondent for the Marines, recently was deployed to Afghanistan and has been writing about his experiences for The Journal News and LoHud.com. He was deployed in August 2004 to Anbar province in Iraq, where he covered the battle of Fallujah.

With White House officials saying that President Barack Obama will order about 30,000 more troops, including a brigade of Marines from Camp Lejeune, into combat in Afghanistan, local military are reacting to the news with skepticism and concern.

A Cape Coral soldier has died in Iraq, and a Jacksonville marine has died in Afghanistan.

President Barack Obama's speech at West Point Tuesday night will have direct implications for troops at Camp Lejeune - 1,000 of which are expected to deploy before the end of this month as the first part of his announced surge in Afghanistan.

Over the past eight years, deployments to the Middle East have become so routine at this military base that President Obama 's declaration Tuesday of a military buildup in Afghanistan was like an announcement that winter was coming.

Getting 30,000-35,000 troops into some of the world's most backward terrain in six months will be the most ambitious troop movement yet in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it will compel an already strained military to move large forces faster than ever before, military officials said Wednesday.

The troops at this base in Wardak province, west of Kabul, learned of Obama's decision while watching TV clips of his speech during their breakfast of sausage, eggs, hash browns, fruit and cereal.

Battle-weary U.S. troops and their families braced for a wrenching round of new deployments to Afghanistan announced Tuesday by the president, but many said they support the surge as long as it helps to end the eight-year-old conflict.