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On TV and in the press, this confusion of roles and erosion of protocol can be seen in the way high-ranking American officers--most, but not all, retired--offer themselves as pundits and commentators. They hint that they're still in close contact with the Pentagon, then proceed to lay out, with troubling specificity, where we'll go next, how quickly and for what purpose. Aren't old soldiers supposed to be tight-lipped and poker-faced? When Lieut. General William Wallace, who leads our ground forces, aired certain strategic and tactical misgivings that wound up on the front page of the New York Times, he became part commander, part commentator--a strange and unsettling new combination.
But then who would have thought that the war's great hero thus far would be a teenager assigned to the rear supply lines? Jessica Lynch, the person and the story, defies so many wartime stereotypes that she has forced us to create a new one: the scrappy, indomitable, steely soldier chick. Liberal feminists I know who reflexively opposed this war woke up changed women the morning that Lynch's exploits were described in the Washington Post. "I hope she blew them all away," one told me, her surging sense of pride and solidarity trumping her lifelong abhorrence of firearms. (So much for the M-16 as phallic symbol.) The other hero in Lynch's story, the conscience-stricken Iraqi lawyer who walked miles back and forth across a battle zone to help the army plot her rescue, confounds the biggest preconception of all: monolithic Islamic anti-Americanism. Not only don't they all hate us, they're not a "they," it seems, and perhaps we're becoming less of a "they" too. It's too early to know. The war is in our faces still. Once we were able to see it from on high, as gods and generals are said to, but no more. We're on the ground now, and everything looks different.