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This week in American power projection: the map was wrong, the dorms were fine, and the travel card was for official purposes.

Story Roundup

Pentagon casualties, metric improvement, and Fat Leonard’s least dignified phase.

Situation Report

A State Department map that relocated most of Africa, one ambitious government travel card, and 5,200 medical students moved from dorms that definitely do not have mold.

Soldier kicked out of Special Forces because he can't grow a beard

FORT CAMPBELL, KY – A former member of the U.S. Army’s elite 5th Special Forces Group is not a happy soldier these days. Army Staff Sergeant Mark Diggs is still coming to grips with the fact that his childhood dream of being a Green Beret has been cut short due to an unofficial technicality in the esteemed group’s operating procedures.

“It’s really embarrassing,” said the twenty-eight year old from Spicer, MN. “I keep trying to tell myself that I’m just highly evolved, but it still doesn’t make up for the fact I have a testosterone level of an eleven year-old French boy.”

Diggs is referring to his recent ejection from the legendary unit based on his inability to grow a suitable combat beard.

“My instructors warned me during Robin Sage that I was walking a thin line when they discovered that my hair wasn’t filling out,” he added. “I kept telling them, ‘Patience, patience, it’ll happen. I’m one-sixteenth Cherokee … these things take a while.’ But in my heart I knew I was only delaying the inevitable.”

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