I'm a journalist and former Marine officer. Here's an excerpt from an April 25th piece I wrote for Salon.com. Would appreciate feedback from SWJ members. Thanks.

"As with so many issues in war, the closer you look into a situation, the harder it can be to judge. As a former Marine officer, my first impulse is, somewhat predictably, to sympathize with the troops. Judgments come easy when you're sitting in the comfort of your living room, but when you are taking fire from seemingly every direction, the finely wrought laws of war start to seem like the dreams of a war college professor. I've interviewed hundreds of soldiers and Marines who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan and I'm repeatedly struck by the weighty, almost metaphysical, overtones of modern combat, in which soldiers have a half second to make the right decision and many years to live with the results of making the wrong one. (And those are only the scenarios, of course, in which the soldiers live to tell the tale.)

But one of the great tragedies of incidents like Haditha and Nangarhar is that no matter how they are adjudicated by the Pentagon, they are resounding defeats in a global conflict whose battlefield is ever media-oriented. They draw dark comparisons in the U.S. media with the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, provide fodder for anti-U.S. sympathizers elsewhere, and fit conveniently into the larger meta-narrative of quagmire and American perfidy overseas."

link to article:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature.../26/nangarhar/