An e-mail:

I’m not a military chaplain any more, but I was – and I spent a little bit of time in Afghanistan in 2003 with our SOF guys. We risk lives to capture people, only to be castigated and humiliated for capturing them. We take needless casualties in order to avoid even the remote possibility of killing someone who’s not actively trying to kill us, and still get blamed for “civilian” deaths. We are asked to risk our lives at the direction of a commander in chief who won’t even risk a few paltry votes to back us up. It’s hard to keep up morale and motivation under those conditions. This is war. We need to either be all in for the fight, or get out and take the consequences. If we do the former, we can and will win. If we do the latter, God only knows what will become of us.