I suspect, Gareth, that many of these sentiments are based on a complete lack of understanding of what war means. Never mind that it is the most gruesome situation a human can be in. When one is in it, civvy street veneers and noble sentiments get displaced by the law of the jungle. Asking people to do that is bad enough. Asking them to do it and then peppering them with civilian standards of nicety is just plain unreal.

I was talking to a friend who explained something to me about the discrimination between civilian and military individuals in a field like Iraq, when they go covert/guerilla, and become indistinguishable from the civilians. In Vietnam, he said, he learned to be less discriminating the day he saw an 8 year old girl roll a grenade into a buddy's tent and run away, killing the tent's occupant. He learned that the extra thirty seconds spent on wondering about civilian versus combatant could be the difference between living, yourself, and ending up fragged into smithereens like his buddy in the tent.

Now -- horror stories are plentiful and the trials of combat are so gruesome I cannot think about them without feeling like vomiting myself. I am not proposing that we should all start thinking like ruthless warriors. But I do think we should reflect somewhat on what it means to be in in a minute-to-minute life-and-death live-fire situation. It is unrealistic to pass moral judgements around without a strong sense of the reality you would be immersed in if you were walking in his combat boots, ducking grenades and watching the enemies fire mortars on their own people as has occurred several times in the last 72 hours at the exits from Basra.



A