Tom, you ridiculed my suggestion that there was a better way to train people at checkpoints. The answer to your challenge to come up with something better was published today. Someone already has, though apparently the lessons have not been considered important enough to pass on through formal training... yet.

Nathaniel Fick, former Marine captain, in today's NYT as a guest op-ed columnist, gives us the benefit of his experiences as a field commander in Iraq in a column titled "Manning the Barricades". The last four paragraphs:

The fact is, checkpoint techniques can be taught. My platoon had to learn them on the fly, but that was two years ago. The lessons we and other troops learned should have been institutionalized long ago.

For example, we tried and discarded the three tactics that were used to warn the Italians as they approached the checkpoint: hand and arm signals, warning shots and shooting into the vehicle's engine block. We found that hand and arm signals were tough to decipher, and subject to different cultural interpretations. Warning shots are hard to hear or see, and frequently only panic the driver they're intended to warn. Shooting into engine blocks to avoid injuring passengers is Hollywood fantasy. Even my Marine snipers - some of the best marksmen in the world - couldn't do it consistently.

So we adapted. For example, once while driving through a town, we cut down a traffic sign - a bright, red octagon with the word "stop" written in Arabic - and used it at checkpoints. Who knows how many lives this simple act of theft may have saved? We also learned to shoot off highly visible smoke grenades and brightly colored flares when possible threats approached. We started putting our concertina wire at least two football fields away to give us more reaction time.

Every combat unit learns its own lessons from hard experience. The important thing is that they be passed on so they are not continually relearned at the cost of innocent lives. Americans must understand that tragic mistakes in war are unavoidable, but that every legal, moral and strategic imperative demands that they be kept to a minimum. This is our obligation to Ms. Sgrena and to Mr. Calipari's family, to the thousands of Iraqi civilians who pass through military checkpoints each day, and to the Americans who must man them and live with their decisions.

These battlefield lessons have been available and not communicated to others in the field. Maybe now that we have irritated someone who matters to the higher-ups, they will be.