Soldier Morale

Great little article on the troops in Iraq:

UNFORTUNATELY, WHEN IT COMES to Iraq the American public demands a purer distillation than reality -- i.e. what this soldier and 130,000 others like him experience everyday -- can provide. "What's it like there?" and "How is troop morale?" are questions I feel as if I've been asked a thousand times since returning from Iraq, only to watch eyes glaze over as I equivocate and wrestle with the complexities of what I saw there. Reporters and political figures eager to turn the war into a partisan issue, on the other hand, are only all too willing to provide impossible starkness, urging us to choose between John Murtha's fire and brimstone and Don Rumsfeld's True Grit optimism, as if there were no other options.