[Mr. Lucky]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

[shhrubbery!]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

He sure is. Sounds like an obnoxious snot, but at least he's reached a little higher plane than the one he occupied before his war experience.

[Feckless]

Part of it is his being a journalist. Part of it is being shot at and living to tell about it.

[txzman]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

My thought's exactly.

[r9etb]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

Yes, he is. The fellow's problem is that he sees himself as an "Authority on The War," when in fact his role was to report on the battles, and the men who fought them.

Maybe he'll grow out of it....

[caisson71]

My thoughts exactly.

[Little Bill]

The question is whether the coverage I provided during the war was tainted as a result.

The Marines protected his sorry A$$, he had no weapon, and, unlike Dan Rather would have done, he alerted the troops to the source of fire. Why do these people think that reporter equals citizen of the world? Rather than some prevert/skank hack that can put words together.

[NotJustAnotherPrettyFace]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

Most journalists are - arrogance seems to come with the territory, sorry to say.

[RonF]

This young man is learning what the word "objectivity" means. He has likely been taught that it means avoiding direct experiences and emotions, so as to keep them from coloring your reporting.

What he's found out, though, is that not having experiences keeps you from getting the first hand knowledge necessary to truly report what happened. The challenge of being objective is to have those experiences, but then to use your reason and judgement to recognize where your emotions are coloring your observations, and edit your report accordingly.

This is very difficult. It takes maturity and self-knowledge, something that takes more than 4 years in journalism school to attain. A good editor helps, especially if he or she is one who's smelled the smoke themselves.

[ErnBatavia]

This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?

Yes...and his lack of "staying power" is obvious by the last paragraph.

[No Truce With Kings]

"This young man's rather full of himself, isn't he?"

And he admits it:

"I found myself scoffing at the rear-echelon soldiers for how little they knew about war. About the real war, the one I had experienced, with enemy AK-47 rounds buzzing over your head and the smell of burning flesh and metal filling your nose. About enduring four weeks on the front lines, sleeping in open foxholes you'd dug to avoid shrapnel in the night. About looking terrible, smelling worse, and seeing people die.

Where were the headquarters Johnnies then, I smugly asked myself this week as I walked the former headquarters of the Iraqi secret police, now home to the US Marines' First Division. Probably drinking coffee, eating hot meals, sleeping on cots in canvas tents, and moving arrows around on wall maps.

My line of reasoning was patently ridiculous, of course. The men and women who wear the uniforms are professional soldiers; I'm a professional reporter. And not a particularly brave one, at that."

But if you think about it, anyone who is part of a group that shot its way from the Gulf to Baghdad in three weeks has earned some measure of right to be full of himself. Brave or not, full of himself or not, he took the same risks as the soldiers he was traveling with. So, I say yeah, he's full of himself, but cut him a little slack, because you would have to be Albert Schweitzer not to be a little full of yourself after that.

He has learned from this exercise. With luck he will no longer be reflexively hostile to the American military.

[sit-rep]

He's from Boston...