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4. Which news source do you think is more reliable, A.P. or the DOD, since you brought the DOD up?

4. Neither. Both have agendas.

With all due respect, I join myself to the opinions of DoughtyOne in this matter.
Granted that the medical services of the military have been saving the lives of grieviously wounded people who would in any prior conflict almost certainly have died - and who thus are faced with extreme recoveries, if indeed they do recover. And that that is the difference between saying that three thousand American troops were killed, and perhaps twice that number - or more. Which means that the fate of those thousands of "fatally wounded" - but miraculously surviving - troops is a legitimate political issue. Full stop.
But IMHO there can be no reasoned political discourse in America which does not take into consideration that
Half the truth is often a great lie. - Benjamin Franklin
That is, a story can be perfectly true, and still be studiedly deceptive. I can take this article pretty much as written, on the one hand - and on the other hand I can keep my profound suspicion of the motives of the AP on the other. Both are aspects of reality.
You will be tempted to see my references to the Associated Press as an illegitimate conspiracy theory, but this is not the stuff of tinfoil hats but of the open public record. I have analyzed the issue of "bias in the media over a long period of time, and from a philosophical perspective. And what shakes out is that the transition between the frankly partisan papers of the founding era - Hamilton and Jefferson waged their partisan battles in newspapers they sponsored - and the more extremely partisan journalism of today is temporally and logically correlated with the founding of the Associated Press - originally, the New York Associated Press.
In the founding era, national and international news traveled by sailing ship, pony express, and itinerant peddler. The newspapers were local affairs, not systematically tied together, and other people got national/international news as fast, generally, from other sources as they did from the local printer. Newspapers were not dailies, more like weeklies - but not even necessarily on a fixed schedule. The telegraph changed that - the telegraph and the (1848) founding of the Associated Press. The AP is what homogenized American journalism.
Suddenly news was a commodity which could be sold nationwide, and the local presses were no longer unambiguously independent. Now there was a (single) overarching organization which propagated news nationally, and although local editors massaged the stories, and selected which ones to print and with what emphasis, in a very real sense the local banner declaring Philadelphia Inquirer or Milwaukee Sentinel or whatever was simply a curtain behind which stood: the AP.
The AP is the distilled interest of journalism. Which is to attract attention with ephemeral stories today, and to do the same thing with other ephemeral stories tomorrow. And to have those stories first. And the ultimate interest of journalism is to make the newspaper (or broadcast) journalist seem important. And that is an incentive to promote journalists above (other) corporations, and above the police and the military. And the easy way to do that is to criticize and second guess the corporations and the military and the police. IOW, what "objective journalism" calls "progressive" or "liberal" is simply the political implications of the self-interest of journalism.
But the original topic was,
4. Which news source do you think is more reliable, A.P. or the DOD, since you brought the DOD up?
4. Neither. Both have agendas.
To which the short reply is that while of course it is true that the DOD has an agenda, that is essentially irrelevant in the context of the countervailing propaganda power arrayed against the DOD. The propaganda power of the DOD is a de minimus in comparison to the AP, and consequently the DOD has to be as honest as possible to be able to withstand the second guessing of the AP.

I appreciate your remarks. I agree with them.

It also occurs to me that the left has nearly pulled off what they accomplished in Vietnam.

If you’ll remember, they really cared about the troops in that campaign also. Despite that they had the American populace so scared of people who served in Vietnam, that they were reticent to hire them when they returned.

The same A.P. that cares for our men here, will herald with glee those who spit on their fellow troops when they return home.

Take care.

Sorry, should read...

The same A.P. that cares for our men here, will herald with glee those who spit on them when they return home.