Leaving behind a newborn to go to war would probably be hard for most parents.

Imagine how Michelle Hinds feels.

The U.S. Army captain is being deployed to Iraq. She got her orders earlier this week, less than four months after giving birth to quadruplets.

A dentist stationed at the Womack Army Medical Center in Fort Bragg, N.C., Hinds grew up in Bowdoinham. Her grandparents and several aunts, uncles and cousins live in the Lewiston-Auburn area.

It’s been a crazy week for all of them.

Last Tuesday, Army officials told the 28-year-old new mother that she had to go to Iraq for a year. On Thursday morning, they changed their minds and told her that she didn’t have to go at all.

Thursday afternoon, she got another call: She was going from February to April.

According to her local relatives, Hinds is attempting to fight the orders with a doctor’s note. But she isn’t hopeful.

The Army has been known to deploy soldiers months after giving birth. Unfortunately, the Army manual says nothing about quadruplets.

– Lisa Chmelecki
You say to-mah-to

Is it “backward” or “backwards?”

When stonemasons carved the English translation of Auburn’s Latin motto, “Nulla Vestigia Retrorsum,” on Auburn Hall, did they add an errant “s”?

Both the original Latin and the English translation “No Steps Backwards” are included on the new stone columns that frame the entrance to Auburn Hall, being renovated for municipal offices on Court Street.

Webster’s New World Dictionary allows interchangeable use of “backward” and “backwards” to mean going in reverse, while the Associated Press Stylebook, the Bible of the modern newsroom, urges writers not to use “backwards” at all.

City Manager Pat Finnigan said the issue has come up before. The city’s official motto is in Latin, not English, so there is some room for disagreement.

“I’m not an English major, so I can’t say for sure,” Finnigan said Friday. “But isn’t ‘ain’t’ more accepted now than it used to be? Of course, now I’ll probably be sent to the back of the class for that statement.”

What’s important, Finnigan said, is the sentiment the motto expresses – not backing down but always moving forward.

It may be the same issue covered in the old song lyrics, “You say to-may-to, I say to-mah -to,” Finnigan said.

– Scott Taylor

Dam determined

Environmental activist Brownie Carson says he will fight to remove more dams from more Maine rivers, even if he has to shake up a few overly obstinate bureaucrats.

Earlier this year, an official from the U.S. Department of Interior was so opposed to the notion of dam removal, he told reporters that the department was done with such work.

“More will come down over my dead body,” the man said, according to Carson, executive director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“I don’t want to stand here and threaten his life,” Carson told council members this week at the organization’s annual meeting. “But I’m not going to stop.”

– Daniel Hartill