From Army of One to Band of Tweeters
From Army of One to Band of Tweeters by John Spencer, New York Times
It was the end of a long combat patrol near a district called Adhamiyah, in northwest Baghdad, in the fall of 2008. It started like most daily missions but ended with a hidden enemy throwing a grenade at a vehicle convoy, missing it but hitting a young Iraqi child instead. As the company commander, I met the soldiers at the site and after a few hours followed them back to our base. I left the men, went to stow my equipment and brief other officers.
When I went back to talk to the soldiers who had been on the patrol, I was surprised to find them not grouped in conversations about what had happened, as I’d come to expect during my career in the military. Instead, they were sitting silently in front of computer screens, posting about their day on Myspace and Facebook.
The term “band of brothers” has become almost a cliché to describe how the close personal bonds formed between soldiers translate into combat effectiveness…