thufir – it was, in part, the lack of plausibility. Although I have not been to war, I was an enlisted man for over a decade. I think I understand the mindset quite well. The idea of repeatedly and deliberately crashing a combat-loaded Bradley into walls – or mocking a wounded woman in a mess hall and not getting beaten to death – did indeed strike me as so implausible as to be impossible.
It was also that, by describing rather awful things as being routine, he was smearing the army as a whole. Not to say that all soldiers are plaster saints – clearly they’re not, or that bad things don’t happen in war – clearly they do, but STB’s story on the IED woman made it seem as if a really awful sort of cruely was accepted and routine. He made it seem like discipline was so lax that a Bradley driver could go dog hunting, thereby placing the Bradley and those in it in grave danger merely to get him his sick thrills. He made it seem like the sanitation system in Baghdad was so bad that kids had to play in waist-deep rivers of sh*t (we all know that the infrastructure in Iraq suffers from decades of neglect and abuse – and that for years Baghdad received electricity at the expense of the rest of the country). He made it seem like Iraq was overrun with zombie dogs (Ok that one was more bizarre than offensive). In short STB defames his fellow soldiers and the army as a whole. He could not find the sort of stories that he wanted to write about, so he made them up – some from whole cloth (the IED woman) and some from kernels of truth (an old cemetary becomes a mass grave).
It matters because while TNR has a small circulation, it is read by influential people in politics and journalism. Stories go from TNR, to the NYT to the local news.
