The Picture of the Soldier

By now, probably everyone has seen "the picture" I am talking about--headshot of a lance corporal in Iraq, face grimy, eyes faraway, cigarette dangling from his mouth a la Humphrey Bogart. (Update--he's now known as the Marlboro Man.) It's an AP photo, and it's been everywhere. Letters to the Editor in Dallas Morning News were mostly predictable: he's every soldier everywhere, etc. They chose to print one asinine letter, however, that was guaranteed to provoke response: one woman complained that the soldier was a bad role model because he was smoking and youth are impressionable. And of course all the other readers jumped on that like crazy, berating her for her shortsightedness; columnists also weighed in on the matter, so we'll keep hearing about it for several days.

My reaction is somewhat different; of course it's a terrific picture, destined in appear in all the coffeetable books that will one day come out of this war. But because the Dallas Morning News chose to run the silly "smoking" letter, the community is now spending a lot of ink and energy delving into the poor letterwriter's psyche. Do you think we could spend our time on more productive discussions about the war in general or how we are to take care of our soldiers once they're home, and drop the smoking issue?