General Column Writing
WINNER: JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY, MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
The Pentagon says that if you offer more realistic college benefits, too many troops might decide to leave at the end of their enlistments and take advantage of it. And that, they say, would only make it even harder to find and enlist enough recruits to man our wars. Those arguments against doing the right thing for college veterans are, in the case of our “wartime president,” about what I’ve come to expect of a man whose support for our troops has never extended past strutting through the latest photo op on a military base or an aircraft carrier.
James Asher, investigative editor for McClatchy Newspapers wrote, “For more than 40 years … Joseph Galloway has been looking out for America’s soldiers, and when he writes about war, he writes about them, and not about polls or politics or public relations campaigns.”
Judges said: “The only civilian ever awarded a Bronze Star during the long Vietnam War, Joe Galloway spoke out against the powers that be, not out of an ideological crusade but because he felt those powers were, for no good reason, shortchanging the troops with ‘callous indifference to the service, sacrifice and suffering’ they and their families endured. Galloway’s work in 2008 echoes the best of (H.L.) Mencken’s poison darts and Ernie Pyle’s preference for the common soldier over the generals and statesmen.”
On Oct. 24, 2008, Galloway wrote: “It could take a decade or more to repair all the damage that Bush, Dick Cheney and all their henchman in prison, out of prison and on their way to prison have done to our economy, our military, our standing in the world, our Constitution and to civil discourse, common decency and competent governance.”
An additional honor for Galloway is that in 2008, a group of 50 military historians polled by Military Magazine voted his book, “We Were Soldiers Once … and Young,” co-written with Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (retired), as one of the top 10 war books of all time.
More online: http://tinyurl.com/mffgq4
