Capt. William Guenther in Baghdad:

Sir, I hoping that you could possibly help me with this. Maybe you can’t, but I’ll have gotten it off my chest. I am an Army officer that is just beginning a year long tour in Iraq, as an advisor with the Iraqi Special Police Commandos. While I have every reason to believe that I will return home safety in eleven months, my eyes are also open to the possibility of that not being the case.
The reason I am writing you is that I have just read your article about what Susan Paynter wrote about the Marine “kidnapping” in Seattle. At the end of your article, you mentioned that you were somewhat taken aback by the fact that just a week or so earlier she had written a tribute to those who had lost a loved one. I went to her paper’s Web site to read that article. Sure enough there it was: another story about a soldier, or their family, as victim. And typically they are portrayed as a victim of George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld. In and of itself that isn’t a problem, but in so many cases that is all soldiers over here are to the elite: victims