Soldiers' Creature Comforts?

"Being on a big military base, even one in a relatively dangerous spot, can feel a bit like being on a cruise ship," writes Graeme Wood in a dispatch on TheAtlantic.com. "Grand exertions are made to ensure comfort, and leisure is organized: basketball at six, bingo at 11."

Writing from Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan, Wood notes the dizzying array of multinational and multicultural restaurants that have been dropped into the war zone, and the other efforts to provide at least some of the comforts of home to a diverse group of coalition forces.

It's common for people to say that easy access to pizza and burger joints makes soldiers soft. (Wood quotes a Vietnam veteran in Iraq, working for DynCorp, as saying that today's soldiers "aren't worth a hair on a Nam vet's ass.") But ultimately, he writes, the real problem may be that making deployed life a pale imitation of the home front could sap troops' morale.

"The happiest soldiers I met, Wood says, "were the ones who spend months at a time in bleak, perilous conditions, and who scorn the doughnuts and menus of their less exposed countrymen."