The U.S. Army might not be able to attend career fairs or hold recruitment events right now, but its soldiers can still beat you in video games. The U.S. Army eSports division, launched out of Fort Knox, Tennessee as a recruitment effort, is thriving amid the coronavirus pandemic.
"When someone engages with the U.S. Army, especially soldiers, and they see a uniform, they may not necessarily understand who's underneath that uniform," said Sergeant First Class Christopher Jones, general manager of U.S. Army eSports. "A lot of times that I've talked to different people across America and they find out that I'm a gamer — a long-time gamer — they may give me an interesting look to say 'Oh I didn't realize soldiers play games.'"
The eSports division is a competition team and was created to make soldiers more "visible and relatable to today's youth." Its members are drawn from both the active-duty Army and the Army Reserves, representing the military branch in competitions and events nationwide.
Though the members of the eSports outreach teams are not recruiters, they play a support role in getting young gamers to see soldiers in a different light and offering up insight into careers the Army has to offer.
During the coronavirus pandemic, this remote outreach can net more prospective recruits than traditional means, which underscores the team's success. At its core, however, the program is meant to connect society with its soldiers.
"We created this program to connect America to its army through the passion of gaming," said Jones.
The chief suspect in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway has admitted he beat the young Alabama woman to death on a beach in Aruba after she refused his advances. New details in the killing emerged Wednesday as Joran Van der Sloot pleaded guilty to extorting Holloway's mother, resolving a case that has captivated the public’s attention for nearly 20 years.
The trial of a Fugees rapper, who was convicted this year in multimillion-dollar political conspiracies, stretched across the worlds of politics and entertainment — and now the case is touching on the tech world with arguments that his defense attorney bungled the case, in part, by using an artificial intelligence program to write his closing arguments.
Israel said Wednesday that it will allow Egypt to deliver limited quantities of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, the first crack in a 10-day siege on the territory. Palestinians reeled from a massive blast at a Gaza City hospital that killed hundreds the day before and grew increasingly desperate as food and water supplies ran out.
A 4000-year-old slab of rock is being dubbed a treasure map for archaeologists. The rock was found in 1900 at the site of an ancient tomb in northwestern France and it was declared Europe's oldest known map in 2021.
Hundreds of people gathered for a vigil honoring a six-year-old Palestinian-American boy who was stabbed to death over the weekend by his family's landlord in an apparent hate crime.
