This weekend 5 GI’s (Buddhika Jayamaha, Wesley Smith, Jeremy Roebuck, Omar Mora, Edward Sandmeier, Yance Gray, and Jeremy Murphy) authored a column in the New York Times entitled The War as We Saw It. This article has been attracting controversy: From Hardball to O’Reilly, people are fired up that a group of active duty NCO’s published an article on the state of the ground war in Iraq. Though I can understand the certainly cringe-worthy issue of front line soldiers venting their frustration to major news sources, I am glad that in this case, they did.

It is considered a faux pas for soldiers to offer political insight. This hasn’t always been the case. We like to think of our soldiers as dutiful enforcers of political might. However, soldiers are just as prone to opinions as the rest of us and they are, in fact. a reflection of our democratic society. Moreover, who better to offer insight into our situation in Iraq than people who are actually on patrol putting their lives at risk. For all the tough talk by politicians about what we should or shouldn’t do, for all of the lip service paid by men in suits toward men in uniform, we get skittish when men in uniform speak their mind.

Who else should we be talking to? The best of embedded reporters in Iraq are still one degree of separation away from having to shoot someone; we should be getting our news, in part, from soldiers in the field instead of through the filter of reporters and editors, or worse, from ex-soldiers who now have an axe to grind. Active duty men walk a fine line when speaking their mind.

The issue this week us whether these five men are showing disloyalty by writing a frank but very balanced article. I was actually surprised by the tone - there was nothing disloyal about what these soldiers said. There was certainly nothing “unpatriotic” as subjective as that term may be. In this article there was little that we don’t already know or haven’t suspected for a long time. It is, however, the first published account of its type in a major news source (a liberal one too) and this is challenging a convention.

However, this convention is one that has been frequently challenged. Soldiers have historically vented their opinions to Congressman and Senators on national television in committee hearings on everything from strategy to body armor. They are encouraged by Congress to do so. Soldiers occasionally publish stories, poems, or even their own opinion pieces, often in magazines and on websites associated with the military. Uniformed officers publish scholarly articles for the Army War College and teach “mistakes”, often contemporary blunders, at the Service Academies. It is a falsehood that active duty military leaders need to be silent – in fact it is a detriment to the service if they don’t share their opinions.

It is only when you have something published in an outside newspaper or magazine that the disloyalty hawks and the Chain of Command fascists come out questioning your patriotism. Will this letter hurt morale? I can’t answer this question but it is hard to imagine that a well-reasoned article on the difficulties of fighting an insurgency in Iraq is more detrimental to morale than the actual fighting of the insurgency, which has to be a rather tough thing on morale itself. I anything, I would think a letter from the grunt’s perspective would be a welcome thing for soldiers in the field – their voices and frustrations are being heard over the usual political static and military jargon of the General Staff.

It is cheap and easy to question one’s patriotism or loyalty. It’s far easier to do that than to accept that some of the things in this article are probably true.