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• There has been a great deal of speculation recently that the government might reinstate the draft at some point, in order to replenish the nation's armed forces.
• "Anyone wearing a uniform is eligible," Dr. Bob Lyons, the chief of plastic surgery at Brooke Army Medical Center, said recently, in his office in San Antonio.
• It is true: personnel in all four branches of the military and members of their immediate families can get face-lifts, nose jobs, breast enlargements, liposuction, or any other kind of elective cosmetic alteration, at taxpayer expense.
• (For breast enlargements, patients must supply their own implants.)
• For most procedures, there's at least a ten-day recovery period, and while soldiers are recuperating they're on paid medical leave rather than vacation.
• A Defense Department spokeswoman confirmed the existence of the plastic-surgery benefit.
• According to the Army, between 2000 and 2003 its doctors performed four hundred and ninety-six breast enlargements and a thousand three hundred and sixty-one liposuction surgeries on soldiers and their dependents.
• In the first three months of 2004, it performed sixty breast enhancements and two hundred and thirty-one liposuctions.
• "The benefit of offering elective cosmetic surgery to soldiers is more for the surgeon than for the patient," Lyons said.
• We do it to maintain our skills"---skills that are critical, he added, when it comes to doing reconstructive surgery on soldiers who have been wounded.
• "If the Army is doing breast augmentations, it's doing it to practice breast augmentations, period."
• There has been talk lately among soldiers that this benefit is indeed being used as a recruiting tool, but there is no mention of it in any of the recruiting literature.