Someone said that peace is like oxygen. When you have it, you don't think about it. When you don't have it, it's all you think about. Because we have peace today, we tend not to think about the successes and the sacrifices of the men and women who are ensuring that we have peace today and tomorrow. So when the military, like any large, diverse organization, experiences problems, the problems tend to be magnified out of proportion.
Molehills become mountains.
Peccadilloes are magnified into the road to perdition in the eyes of some. It's a very distorted picture of what the military is doing day to day. It's a picture, I might add, that can change rather quickly. Not long ago there were a number of prominent journalists, students of military matters, who were wondering if the armed forces were too good for America. I must say, our military overall is better educated and more disciplined than society at large, and its members have higher standards than most of their civilian counterparts.