Just finished a few days ago the paperback of Imperial Grunts by Robert D. Kaplan - a 5-star book I highly recommend - and reading that book only fuels my belief that if you support our troops, you need to read up on them.

You can start, for free, by reading Mattis on the Marines: Pendleton commander upbeat about morale, progress in Iraq in the North County Times.  If you know anybody who either is relative to or is a Marine, probably a wise thing to e-mail them a link to the story.

Lt. Gen. Mattis also makes allusion to what Leaning Straight Up & yours truly blogged - the troops "choose the lifestyle" because "they want their children to have the same freedom I had" and "passing it on" as well as "have a lot more responsibility than the average American".  The Lt. Gen. says, "what we have is a force where we currently see the lowest rates of misconduct and desertion as long as we've been keeping the statistics. Spousal abuse is declining, going downward, drug abuse continues to hover at very, very low levels. Our re-enlistment rates are at all-time highs, and the quality of what we are bringing in to the re-enlisted force, if these are the Marines that are able to re-enlist, most of them are coming out of the top half of that cohort."

[Hat-tip: Hugh Hewitt]