Time Magazine Selects American Soldier as Person of the Year

WASHINGTON – Three 1st Armored Division soldiers -- Sgt. Ronald Buxton, Spc. Billie Grimes and Sgt. Marquette Whiteside -- grace the cover of today's Time magazine. They represent "The American Soldier" - all men and women in uniform - who have been chosen as Time's 2003 Person of the Year.

"For uncommon skills and service, for the choices each one of them has made and the ones still ahead, for the challenge of defending not only our freedoms but those barely stirring half a world away, the American soldier is Time's Person of the Year," editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs wrote in the opening essay of the magazine, according to a recent article in the American Forces News Service.