us, there is someone who is ready to blame us for whatever goes wrong in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a few other places. (To this day I am thankful I never had to be stationed in Germany or Korea.) In my particular branch, we were blamed for any and all failures while our successes were often kept silent. Many of our failures made the news in the Middle East and we were brutalized for it. One of them was even covered by western media. They brutalized us even more. Not fun, but a fact of life that I learned to deal with.

A lot of my personnel were just out of high school when they joined. They were still under 21 when they got out of training. All of them had to do a lot of stuff that directly affected people's lives. As stated above, they had to live with the fact that local and Western media was highly critical of their mistakes, and in many cases, highly critical of them in general. The answer was never to shelter them. We taught them that criticism is a fact of life, and that the only way forward was to face life head on. Treating them like fragile kids was never the answer.

I believe I have stated numerous times that I would hope that people keep things civil, but I'm a realist and know that won't happen. At the same time, I don't think censorship is the answer.