Honor and Honesty

From Michael Yon’s dispatch:

…I kept asking American officers throughout the day, “Was he really a bad guy?” The soldiers could have said that the dead man was a terrorist, and that they had gotten him. There is so much going on that it would have been difficult for me to know the difference without checking with the hospital and others. But instead they told me, “We think we killed the wrong man.”

I said to the commander, “You know I will write about this, don’t you?”

He answered, “Mike, you can write about the good, the bad, and the ugly. I think we made a mistake, but you were there. You saw what happened. We are still not certain that he is not a cell-member, but we have no proof that he was and my gut tells me he was innocent. I think it was a bad target.”

I am immensely proud of our fighting men. Instead of claiming that they killed an enemy combatant, or worse lie to themselves that they kill an enemy, they courageously admitted that they make a mistake. Imagine the mental anguish that they experienced and will experience for the rest of their lives. People forget that the greatest sacrifice many soldiers make is living with the guilt of war.

You are not going get the same level of honesty and integrity from the main stream media or anti-war activists. Unlike our brave soldiers, the anti-war people have routinely distorted facts, in some case completely fabricated statistic.

It is clear whose are more trust worthy.