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Sandy Gerber was excited when she and her husband, Scott Gerber, an Army colonel, moved into a stately house near the parade field at Fort Meade, Md. — their first on-base home since they were newlyweds in the mid-1990s. “When you come in the Army, you think, ‘Oh wow, I hope someday I can live there,’” Mrs. Gerber said. “But for us, the problems started literally the day we walked in the door.” A broken water line in the kitchen had flooded the house. Pulling up damaged linoleum flooring revealed rotting wood underneath. On rainy days, water streamed into every room. “And the smell of mold was overwhelming,” Mrs. Gerber said. (Ismay, 12/13)

Hope Grosse and Joanne Stanton have fond memories of the childhood they shared in the Philadelphia suburbs. They spent their days outside playing football, riding bikes and — when the Blue Angels came to town — they watched the skies. For kids in Horsham and Warminster Townships, that was just one of the perks of growing up near two active military bases. Grosse, who lived across the street from the Naval Air Warfare Center in Warminster, remembers watching, rapt, as Navy personnel torched airplanes during weekly fire drills and doused the flames with a white, bubbly foam. (Rappleye, Douglas and Thompson, 12/16)

Legislation named after a Fort Bragg, N.C., soldier that will allow some members of the military to file claims to be compensated by the government for medical malpractice is one step closer to being signed into law, after the House of Representatives passed the bill Wednesday. It is a significant departure from decades of existing law — guided by the Feres Doctrine, so called because of a 1950 Supreme Court case — which prevents military service members from suing for compensation for injuries that were a result of military negligence. (Copp, 12/13)