Cal Thomas says he didn't see adultery or alcoholism going on when he served in the Army in the mid-1960s. My guess is that Cal didn't get invited out much. In my military stint a few years later, I saw plenty of alcoholism. If adultery came up short, it wasn't for lack of trying.

I would imagine that today's Army is a much straighter outfit that when I served (in fairness to Cal, it was probably a straighter place when he served than when I did, too). But let's not kid ourselves about military service. Drinking and whoring goes back at least as far as the Romans. In Jaroslav Hasek's comic novel of World War I, "The Adventures of Good Soldier Schweik," just about everybody is drunk just about all of the time. The night before he enters the service, if memory serves, Schweik hits 25 bars. "But, mind you, I never had more than two drinks in any of them," he says the next day.

To blame the failings of guards and interrogators in Iraq on the advent of women in the armed services is a stretch. Even the best armies -- and ours is certainly the best that ever existed -- are exceedingly blunt instruments. To ask them to excel at tasks like nation building is asking an awful lot.