Blondes prefer gentlemen

The Globe's Christie Blatchford prefers soldiers to certain journalists: good thinking, Christie (full text not online). Ms Blatchford is brave enough to single out her egregious colleague, Lawrence Martin, in her article.

Among the first things I read on my way back to Canada -- this in the sweltering web café of an airless transit lounge at New Delhi airport -- was a column in this paper about embedded journalism by my tall friend Lawrence Martin...

Mr. Martin's column first. It annoyed the hell out of me, not because the subject isn't worthy of discussion but rather because it was written, as these things so often are, by one of those ensconced in the bosom of the national press corps.

Dear God, you want to talk about embedding, honey?

Now Laurie is more of an independent crank than most, but Ottawa-centric reporting, where journalists, bureaucrats, mandarins, lobbyists and MPs share small and oft-overlapping social circles -- not to mention the guiding belief that a fart from one of their own is inherently more interesting and important than, oh, a flood in the dreary Prairies -- is a more insidious form of embedding than what my colleagues and I were doing in Afghanistan.

And for what it's worth, they in the nation's capital, as I understand it, also fairly frequently actually have it off with one another, whereas fraternization between Canadian soldiers and journalists is, alas and alack, verboten...

I was en route back to the real Canadian world, where people pontificate from comfortable places, spout big thoughts from small knowledge bases, Monday-morning quarterback the way most of us breathe.

Four weeks I had with the smart, thoughtful , often courageous men and the few good women of our military. I got used to plain talk, followed by action; people who are patient with one another and cover one another's backs; Canucks who actually speak from a position of strength, by which I mean our soldiers, from the lowest rank to the highest, are so much better-informed than their civilian counterparts.

I'm going to miss that. And I'm going to miss them.

Never felt like this, leaving Ottawa.