As I mentioned before, I've been reading Rick Atkinson's "An Army at Dawn." One anecdote that Atkinson relates is how government censors edited letters home from the troops. Journalists and other liberal conspiracy theorists who regularly decry government limitations on media reporting from the battlefield during Operation Iraqi Freedom should look at just how far we've come.

Draconian censorship was soon imposed, with correspondents advised that no dispatches would be allowed that made people at home feel unhappy. Equally rigorous censorship of letters home inspired one soldier to write his parents:

After leaving where we were before we left for here, not knowing we were coming here from there, we couldn't tell whether we had arrived here or not. Nevertheless, we now are here and not there. The weather here is just as it always is at this season. The people here are just like they look.

On this page a censor scribbled simply, "Amen."

I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read that.