Knowledge gap showed in recent war reporting: every editorial writer should learn to move, shoot, and communicate.

I was not a very good soldier. I should make that clear from the first. I lacked the natural instinct and envied those who had it.

I'll always remember the way Willie Griffin could tuck his pillow just so into his bunk to pass any bed check and then head out for a night on the town. He'd saunter in next morning, ready to move, shoot, and communicate--the three cardinal virtues of the artillery. After knowing Willie, I learned never to underestimate anybody out of VMI.

I also knew I could never get away with something like that. Didn't have the soldierly instinct. I'd make some dumb mistake. To quote the officer delivering a critique of my day as battery commander: "That was Cadet Greenberg's fatal error." The phrase has stayed with me, recurring with depressing regularity. Like when noticing the crucial flaw in the first draft of an editorial.

My only hope was to follow the book. Exactly. To the letter. The Army could teach a chimp to move, shoot, and communicate if he would just do it step by step and not get them mixed up. Which is what I did, with intense concentration. I knew it was the only way I'd make it through.

I must have been the most annoying safety officer at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I was certainly a general pain to my superiors, who knew their men and their guns and were quite comfortable with a hairline flaw they knew wouldn't amount to anything. ("Good enough for government work.") And here was this shiny-green lieutenant asking them to put that in writing, sir, before he'd let them fire some harmless round out of the tube and be done with it. (I'd passed by a horrendous accident my first week at Fort Sill, and the acrid air of disaster and impending courts-martial had made a lasting impression.) I never did get those orders in writing. Which was an early lesson in plausible deniability--a concept that came in handy when trying to understand Watergate, Iran-Contra, Travelgate, etc.

In the midst of the late and still sputtering unpleasantness in Afghanistan, some of us old-timers were struck by how much has changed since there was a draft. You can tell by some of the questions asked at Pentagon press briefings and some of the stories that get into print. It wasn't just Afghanistan that was a strange and exotic locale for some in the press, but the U.S. military. They could have been writing for the travel section.

It was all new to these people, and it showed. You probably have your own favorite example of naivete in print. Mine was the fellow who wanted to drop leaflets before a target was bombed to warn any innocents in the neighborhood. (Note to Taliban: DO NOT READ.) Or maybe it was the wide-eyed reporter who noted that Rangers trained with live ammunition! (Did he think they shot blanks? And that our armor trained in cardboard tanks?)

It wasn't the reporters' fault. They were from a different era, not one in which you were expected to go into the service at some point the way you were expected to go to school. And the reporting showed it. So did a lot of the editorial comment, which veered from gung-ho enthusiasm to utter despair with every report and rumor from the front--with no stops in between.

In the first, confused first days of the war in Iraq, we ran an apocryphal interview with General Eisenhower as it might be conducted today. For example: Fox News--"Isn't it true that the enemy has broken the rules of combat, and isn't it true that our men are fighting through tough conditions, and isn't it true that we're the good guys, and isn't it true that America is way cool?"

The New York Times--"Sir, why haven't we liberated Paris yet? We've been at this for hours now, and Paris is still occupied by the Germans."

What was lacking was any first-hand experience of the military life, with its endless ennui sporadically interrupted by the need to get everything done now and then undone just as fast. It helps to have been at the bottom of the chain of command instead of having to comment on its workings as you would the doings of some mysterious corporation.

Looking back, maybe through the warped mirror of nostalgia, I'd nominate my time in the Army as the second most educational experience of my life. (The most educational, of course, was raising teenagers, and it was only a little more harrowing.)

I hated every minute of my time in the Army. Even the leaves were soured by the knowledge they would end. And yet the service leaves one with a certain perspective. You might even absorb a few principles of military "science"--not by the book but just by having to live with them: unity of command, the importance of maneuver, the element of surprise, getting there fustest with the mostest, not sweating the small stuff, knowing your objective and also knowing how to say "No Excuse, Sir"....

Some of those lessons may even be useful outside the U.S. Army. Every editorial writer needs to know how to move, shoot, and communicate.

Paul Greenberg, winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, is a former captain in the U.S. Army and editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette. E-mail paul_greenberg@adg. ardemgaz.com