There was a time in the history of our military that remarks like those made by Wallace would get an officer canned. When the next two promotions lists came out, he could be assured that his name would not be on the lists and his military career was over. Some would argue against such a system, but it points out the fact that those who are tasked with leading our fighting men and women into a life and death combat situation need to possess and practice judicious wisdom and restrained speech.

The Boston Globe ran an article today (Sunday) in which the headline and subhead ask if Iraq was "...turning into another Viet Nam..." That is totally assinine! The last paragraph of the article was a C-Y-A statement that there is a long way to go before one could make a reasonable and intellectually honest comparison between the two conflicts, but few ever read that far. Those to whom such tripe panders will seize upon every other paragraph of such biased reportage to make a case about our nation's error in pursuing a necessary war against a despot and his murderous cronies who would gladly provide weapons of mass destruction to Islamic madmen who have formally declared war on our nation and its citizens.

Dwight Eisenhower said once that battle plans all have one thing in common. The first paragraph calls for revision of all previous plans and parts of those plans, including that one, once the plan is implemented. Other military leaders have pointed out properly that no plan of battle long survives its first contact with the enemy.

What has made our nation's military different is the reliance of our leadership upon the knowledge, thinking skills and adaptability of our battlefield leaders. Many of our military's greatest victories came to be because of the inventiveness of lower level enlisted men in the field encountering a problem, assessing it and arriving at new and innovative ways of solving problems.

No other military on earth does this. Their military leadership remains hidebound to grand battle schemes drawn up by their leaders. Their plans are then implemented without recognition of the changing circumstances on the field of battle.

War is the only competition on earth where your opponents get a vote in your planning and execution of that planning. Viet Nam should have taught us all - not just the military, but the public and especially the press - that it is foolish to permit political appointees to micro-manage the prosecution of war or to wage war based on the vagaries of public relations polls or newspaper headlines. Among the worst offenders of this undeniable principle was the Johnson administration. Look what they managed to do for our young men in Viet Nam.

One of the wisest orders I ever gave to any of my unit leaders was "Figure out how to fix it and do it." I left it to the men in the field who were involved in confronting the problem to come up with answers to its solution then provided them with what they needed to accomplish the objective. They appreciated that and they made me look like a genious as a result.

I wasn't. I simply knew that these men had brains and could use them and their training to solve problems. My job was to give them the training they needed to find those answers. Someone in a pay grade far higher than mine or that of any general officer in any army in the world gave them the American inventiveness and ability to assess, improvise and overcome.

Any military leader who refuses to acknowledge that no battle plan ever conceived of men is ever 100% perfect and meets ever measure of success and performance exactly as stated in the plan is worthy of the cloth to make his uniform. He is a fool and we should never entrust the lives of our young people to such fools. Any so-called journalist or editorial writer who refuses to acknowledge this should be barred from writing even a single word about these matters. They are as much a danger to our military men and women as any enemy bullet, bomb or artillery shell, if not an even greater danger.

I personally blame the media for the majority of insults that were heaped on the young men of my generation who returned from southeast Asia. We were spat upon and called vile names. We took the heat for the errors of our leadership and the biased, inaccurate reporting of so-called "seekers of truth" in the guise of accurate reporting. That heat came from our fellow citizens and we deserved a whole lot better than that.

Don't look for us to join forces with them to do to this generation the wrongs that were done to us. We may discuss among ourselves things we see being done on a battlefield half a world away, but we would never speak those criticiisms aloud. Our troops face enough "friendly fire" horrors without aiming a barrage of "friendly fire" in their direction from those at home and members of the media who know even less.

My only words of advice to our military are a quote I consider to be as patriotic and stirring as those of Patrick Henry and Nathan Hale in our first war as a new nation.

I'm with Todd Beemer.

"Let's roll."