This evening, on the way home from work in a bus, I met a young soldier just back from his first tour in Iraq. In addition to his description of fire fights and explosives, he described something terribly ironic. Toward the end of his tour, an officer from echelons-above-reality was addressing a large group of soldiers and was remarking that we’d be winning this war if only we’d taken a lot fewer casualties.
The soldier’s rejoinder was extremely profane, but amounted to saying something like “a day late and a dollar short.” The rank-and-file understand this war in a manner their leaders seem utterly unwilling to come to grasp with.
