September 5

The United States Army has a highly successful advertising campaign touting the Army’s desire to find individuals who wish to be ‘An Army of One.’ According to their website “The 2006 Game Plan describes the strategic challenges we face to accelerate the momentum we have established to transform our Army.” I somehow doubt that Howard Unruh is the type of recruit the Army is seeking. On the 5th in 1949 Howard Unruh, an Army sharpshooter who served in World War II, left his home in Camden, New Jersey with a German Luger and wandered around the neighborhood shooting and killing 13 of his neighbors This was the first U.S. single-episode mass murder. Mr. Unruh, now in his 80s and a resident of the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital, maintains that he ‘would have killed a thousand if he had bullets enough.’