Afstan: Morale vs attitude

Maj.-Gen. (ret'd) Lewis MacKenzie explains what troops are about (full text not officially online):

The phone calls began at 5:30 Monday morning. Reporters were seeking comment not on the killing of Corporal Tony Boneca, 21, shot through the throat during a firefight with Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan, but rather on the fact that he had expressed displeasure with the mission in e-mails and letters home to his family and fiancée. His frustrations, expressed a mere two weeks before his planned repatriation to Canada, had mobilized the "wobblies," to borrow Margaret Thatcher's vocabulary. They immediately questioned the Canadian mission in Afghanistan and deduced that the morale of our soldiers must have hit rock bottom.

For those readers who have not worn the uniform of a combat soldier, permit me to try to explain the very real difference between morale and attitude...

...While visiting a Canadian infantry battalion (800-plus soldiers) [in Bosnia], I asked the unit's regimental sergeant-major (RSM) -- the senior non-commissioned officer in the unit and one place to the left of God (the unit's commanding officer) -- a simple question: "RSM, how's the soldiers' morale?" The response was direct and illuminating: "Sir, morale couldn't be better, it's sky-high, but the soldiers are really pissed off!"..

It would increase the tragedy of Cpl. Boneca's sacrifice if he's portrayed as a disgruntled and disloyal soldier. He was not. He volunteered to serve in Afghanistan. He saw what was happening around him when he got there and didn't like some of what he saw. That certainly didn't make him unique. When soldiers stop questioning and commenting to those close to them, we are in trouble.

Cpl. Boneca did his job and supported his buddies under the pressure of combat that would intimidate most of us. He deserves our respect, not the titillation associated with eavesdropping on his private comments to his loved ones.

While the Globe's Christie Blatchford takes on her fellow journalists (full text not officially online):

As is common now in the modern world, the debate about Corporal Tony Boneca's death and what it might or might not say about the Canadian mission to Afghanistan began before the young man's body arrived home.

Before the Hercules aircraft carrying his casket ever touched Canadian soil, the man who one day might have become Cpl. Boneca's father-in-law was confessing some of the 21-year-old's most intimate fears to the Toronto Star; some of his e-mails home were published in the Ottawa Citizen; and stay-at-home columnists and others who deign to notice the Canadian Forces only when the death of a fine soldier can be used to further one political cause or another were doing so, while simultaneously protesting that of course they support the troops, it's this damn business of sending them off to kill other folks that offends.

Emerging with dignity out of the whole messy business was the memory of Cpl. Boneca -- because whatever his reservations, fears and resentments may have been, he nonetheless had managed to summon the necessary grit to continue doing what he had volunteered to do -- and the military itself...

Look at what he accomplished: Barely 21, he conquered his fear, he put on his boots and his kit and he was heading up those stairs, clearing that mud-walled compound in that lush grape field on another cloudless, dangerous Afghanistan day, when he was shot. That's bloody answering the bell, by any measure.

And Scott Taylor, in an interview with CFRA, Ottawa, also disagrees with the doom-sayers (audio at this link) about morale, and makes points similar to Lewis MacKenzie's.