Dayam

Now There's Something You Don't See Everyday:

This piece on McChrystal is extremely good journalism -- you have to respect the reporter who managed to get this kind of access, build this kind of trust, and put this together. This isn't how we normally talk in front of reporters; but maybe we should. If the American people understood that this is just how people talk after months deployed, this kind of reporting would not have the potential to be disruptive. Everyone would shrug it off as normal combat steam-blowing. I heard way worse stuff from commissioned officers about Bush than that he was "disappointing" -- and when they'd talk about the next level of higher command, O My God, what you'd hear!

It's not a big deal. This stuff is constant at every level. On the few occasions you'd run into serious friction over it, people understood and would say, "You've gotta eat with those guys" -- meaning, they understood that you had to feel certain things just because of where you were and what you were doing. You get mad, you blow steam, then you suck it up and do the job. The job gets done, and when the deployment is over we forget every complaint and spend the next fifty years going to each other's parties and raising toasts to the memories.

If people thought it looked like something else, it doesn't. That party in Paris reminds me of some of the best times in my life, and why should we expect it to be different?

The problem isn't what was said or done; it's that so few Americans understand why it was said and done. This shouldn't be shocking, and shouldn't cause a political incident. This is how things are when you're talking to soldiers and Marines; the reporter just shows them honestly. It's a pity our politicians have so little stomach for them as they honestly are, because they're the best men we as a nation know how to produce.

Painting them as perfect, as we so often try to do in the press, sets them up for failure when some reporter gets inside the guard. Maybe it's time just to let people learn what it's like.