I'm tellin' ya! WHAT is this world coming to!
When I was in the Army at Ft. Riley, my battalion was tasked with guarding the post Ammo Supply Holding Area. During our period of duty a SINGLE hand grenade was discovered missing. Our batt was "locked down" (restricted to the BN area, no visitors, etc) and a thorough - and I mean thorough - search ensued. After four days of this (I was a married man and lived off post) I had had enough.
I contacted my Representative. Within an hour, a Congressional Inquiry was launched, and within three hours the "lock down" was over - the "missing" grenade was apparently a clerical error.
The point: NO military officer wants to have Congress staring over their shoulder. A General Officer might consider it a duty to inform an elected official of their children's progress.
Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***.........."Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority. ..........***
That and maybe because the dad was also a pilot!