Expectations

"Expectations"

Soldier's Dad at MilBlogs has a short but outstanding post on what things were like in what are now the world's trouble spots when he was a soldier.

We are all confident that America's fighting forces are good, and on balance bring good to wherever they go. I've rarely seen it so concisely demonstrated, however. There is a chain of events in the region starting with the collapse of the USSR and leading through the Gulf War, 9/11, and our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A great deal of the extraordinary positive change has been brought about by US involvement. It's easy, in the daily noise of our enemies and the negative press, to forget just how far we have come in a generation.