I have a Kindle II and generally like it. Right now, IIRC, its price is down to $259.00 from the $359.00 I paid about a year ago. The e-ink used on the screen is perfectly good to read on the instrument's 6" screen. About 300,000 titles are currently available. Being in the Army with limited space for personal gear, your son would really like it because it can hold a little over 1,000 books (try to hump that many paper backs!). Its compact size and light weight also make it a lot easier to carry around and use to read large books, e.g., one of Robert Caro's LBJ biographies, than carrying and reading the large books themselves. It also electronically converts text to language, meaning each book can be listened to as well as read.
Its primary disadvantages, as far as I'm concerned, are that it doesn't have a contrast control, meaning things like maps and half tone illustrations are often washed out and hard to read, and that it lacks color, which really reduces its usefulness when I'm reading a book with a lot of color plates. Indeed, I've just purchased a new 800 page history of the 30 Years' War from Amazon in hard copy precisely because of those two objections.
This article about the B&N device says the color features are apparently only useful for the controls, something the Kindle's buttons are perfectly good for, and the B&N instrument does not give access to color illustrations in the books. If so, it's not better than a Kindle, and may be worse.
My heartiest congratulations and deepest gratitude to you and your son for his service. My prayers are with you and him for his safe return.
That's the main reason I thought it would be a good gift for him. Plus, he's kinda a gadget junkie.
Thank you for your response and your prayers!