Can You Support the Troops but Not the War? Troops Respond Featured Guest Writer Paul Rieckhoff

Four years into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thirty-some years after Vietnam, this country is still wrestling with a relatively straightforward question: "Can you support the troops, but not the war?"

I've made my stance on the issue pretty clear. I think you can do both.

I write about this topic (and others having to do with the politics of the Iraq war) extensively in my new book, Chasing Ghosts.

Regardless of what you think of this war - right, wrong or indifferent - we all have a moral obligation to take care of the men and women who serve. When it comes to issues such as VA funding or adequate body armor, it's time to put ideological differences and partisan bickering aside and just get the job done. "Support the Troops" is not some jingoistic rallying cry, but rather a clear imperative that should be separate from your feelings for or against the war.

"Chasing Ghosts: A Soldier's Fight for America from Baghdad to Washington" by Paul Rieckhoff is a riveting account of life as an infantry combat soldier in Iraq.

Rieckhoff pulls no punches. The read is brutal, thought-provoking, at at times depressing. Depressing because our policy-makers have failed to learn the lessons of earlier generations.

In many ways, "Chasing Ghosts" follows in the footsteps of William Broyles, Jr.'s Vietnam classic, "Brothers in Arms." It also has the strong emotional rips found in Dan Freedman and Jacqueline Rhode's editing of "Nurses in Vietnam: The Forgotten Veterans." Joan Thomas and Shirley Menard, both nurses in Vietnam who contributed chapters to Rhode's book, and I worked on a project with Bill Broyles in 1991. To this day I remember standing in a light rain before several of the panels of the Vietnam War Memorial with Joan and Shirley. While I had been to the Memorial many times before, this one was special. Thinking back on that day, and reflecting on Paul's book...times haven't changed all that much.

To start this month, we have four very good and interesting recommendations from General Clark.

1) Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer : The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames
by Victor Cherkashin with Gregory Feifer

Written by retired senior KGB officer Victory Cherkashin, working with former Moscow correspondent for Radio Free Europe, Gregory Fiefer, this book has been called “a gripping but soberly written expose on the Cold War spy game” by Publisher’s Weekly. Cherkashin relates how he recruited and handled disgruntled CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI special agent Robert Haussen. While focussing on Soviet spy craft, the book also gives details on US spying and counter spying, providing an insiders view of the spy business from just after World War II through the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.