Tom, you just made my point for me. You treat these blogs as gospel and yet you know nothing about these people personally and what their intent is politically. I never said that any of them are false. It's simply that in order to get a balanced picture of anything you hear from members of the military, you must get into the head of a typical soldier. Among the "typical" soldier and sailors I met and interacted with, there were very few that would've had the oral or written talents to ever contemplate creating a blog. Most could barely write a letter home without huge grammatical and spelling mistakes.

At the same time, I met dynamic and wonderful people that I still regard as close friends and have the utmost respect for. The problem here is that they were in the extreme minority of the thousands of individuals I got to interact with.

I never said that I believed today's soldiers in Iraq are going out into Baghdad drinking and having sexual exploits with the locals. I'm certain the leadership is extremely sensitive to the cultural interaction there. However, even if there are severe restrictions placed on these "ambassadors" by their commanders, they are still the same people deep inside with all the same traits that I witnessed in my tour of duty. They are still in large parts young and immature humans that possess prejudice, an attraction to violence and adrenaline rush, a sense of entitlement, arrogance, and all those traits that happen in any segment of American society especially in the age range of most in the military.

The economic dynamic that helps drive military recruitment tends to concentrate those traits within the lower "grunt" ranks of our fighting forces. Unfortunately, it's that segment of our military that often has the initial person to person interaction with the civilian population. They're the ones crashing down the doors and first on the scene with rifles pointing at people's heads. One would hope that first contact would be from the eloquent bloggers you're reading that have a sympathetic world view and a noble purpose behind their service but I truly don't believe that occurs that often. When it does, it's America at its best. When it doesn't, the damage is tough to undue and I doubt gets blogged about much.

All I'm asking for is to keep a balance between what you read and what you view personally about humans as a whole. That driver in rush hour that road rages on you when you don't start out from the intersection as fast he thinks you should is also on point patrolling the streets of Tikrit. That lady that goes through the 9 items or less checkout line at the store with a full grocery cart has a counterpart somewhere in our military. There is no magical transformation that occurs to a human just because they make it through basic training. I saw some improvements but I also saw others that lost some of their basic humanity when put into an angry and regimented environment.

Art