WASHINGTON — Mitt Romney’s selection of Paul Ryan makes this the first presidential election in 80 years in which no one on either ticket has served in the military.

The last time that happened was 1932, before the United States helped win World War II and became a military superpower.

Despite the martial pageantry of Romney’s introducing Ryan on Saturday aboard the battleship Wisconsin, the lack of a veteran in the race underscores the growing distance between today’s all-volunteer military and the vast majority of society which lacks contact with it.

In 1932, John Nance Garner joined Franklin D. Roosevelt’s campaign against then-President Herbert Hoover and Charles Curtis. Roosevelt had served as assistant secretary of the Navy, but that is a civilian position.

This is also the first election since 1944 in which neither of the major party presidential candidates has spent time in the armed forces.

The military draft had long been abolished by the time Ryan and President Barack Obama turned 18.

Vice President Joe Biden was deemed medically ineligible in 1968 during the Vietnam War due to a history of asthma.

Romney received four draft deferments for being a college student and then for doing mission work in France for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

None of them volunteered for service.

In recent elections at least one of the major party candidates had served.

A Fort Bragg soldier says he races every few days on the city's busiest thoroughfares, sometimes topping speeds of 110 mph.

The 20-year-old soldier, who agreed to tell his story only if his first name -- Josh -- were used, said he doesn't go out searching for races. They happen spontaneously, he said, as he travels around the city.

It could be Monday morning on the way to work at Fort Bragg, or a Thursday evening heading home after dinner.

His flashy Nissan 300ZX is like a rolling advertisement: "Who wants to race me?"

"Sometimes people will rev the engine or they'll just fly past you and let themselves idle back to get lined up and you take off, or sometimes you just fly by them and see if they can catch up to you," he said. "I do it for the adrenaline rush, the excitement of just going fast."

Other times, Josh said, races are organized at the box-store parking lots where members of car clubs gather on the weekends.

Josh said he doesn't participate in the "Freaky Friday" drag racing events at Fayetteville Motor Sports Park because by the time he pays to drive to the track and to race, he's spent all of his gas money. It costs $10 to get in the park's gates, and $10 more to race.

So Josh speeds on the streets.
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Other times, he races even when he knows there's no chance he'll win. He said he recently raced his family car -- an old four-door Nissan -- against a turbo-charged BMW on Santa Fe Drive on his way to work.

Josh knows that one set of blue lights in his rearview mirror could cost him military rank and possibly his job.

But the idea of getting caught, losing everything, doesn't deter him. The risk just magnifies the adrenaline rush, he said. There's nothing that could keep him from racing short of having his driver's license revoked.

"I don't see that happening," he said, "but (I'll be racing) until I can't drive on the streets anymore."

SAN DIEGO — New high-tech simulation devices are raising hope among critics that the practice of teaching Navy corpsmen and Marines to treat trauma patients by slicing into live, anesthetized pigs and goats will come to an end.

The Defense Department uses more than 6,000 animals a year for combat-trauma training, according to congressional representatives and animal-rights groups that have criticized the practice as inhumane. But high-tech medical task trainers now let students learn specific medical procedures, like unblocking airways, stopping hemorrhages or treating patients with amputated limbs under extremely realistic conditions.

One such device, the Human Worn Partial Task Surgical Simulator, or “cut suit,” developed by Strategic Operations Inc., replicates human organs and blood vessels. The company’s website claims it is “the most realistic way to simulate the look, feel and smell effects of severe traumatic events on a live human,” while allowing corpsmen and Marines to perform real procedures.

A recent study at Rocky Vista University’s College of Osteopathic Medicine in Parker, Colo., found that second-year medical students who used the “cut suit” as a surgical simulator in training were better skilled and more prepared for stressful clinical rotations. “With each day of exposure to stressful training scenarios, students reported feeling incrementally less stressed and more confident,” researchers wrote in the July edition of the Journal for Healthcare Education, Simulation and Training.

In mid-July, the contractor used the simulator during a trauma-care training event here for corpsmen and Marines preparing to deploy to Afghanistan.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and other groups say that simulators do a better job of teaching first responders how to treat traumatic battlefield wounds, especially when used in realistic and stressful training environments.