September 5

The United States Army faces many challenges as it attempts to manage the personnel requirements of the War on Terror. Even in the best of times, recruiting has been problematic for the military services. They do their best however and maintain an active public relations office to entice people to enlist. At their website, they remind people “There is no limit to the opportunities in the Army — so there’s no limit to what you can learn and achieve. The Army strengthens you, and your future, with expert training in one of over 150 different jobs for Soldiers on Active Duty and over 120 in the Army Reserve.” The Army needs men and women and it attempts to make the experience of being put in positions of grave danger as attractive as they can. I rather doubt that they had someone like Howard Unruh in mind however when they began their recruiting campaign. On the 5th in 1949, Unruh, an Army sharpshooter who served his country in World War II, left his home in Camden, New Jersey with a self-loading, semi-automatic German Luger. He then proceeded to stroll around the neighborhood shooting and killing thirteen of his neighbors. Unruh is now 86 years old and a permanent resident of the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. One psychiatrist reported that Unruh still insists, "I'm no psycho. I have a good mind. I'd have killed a thousand if I had bullets enough." Unruh was the first single episode mass murderer in the United States.