Last summer, as major combat operations in Iraq gave way to a wearying occupation effort, the military newspaper Stars & Stripes began to receive scores upon scores of letters from American troops complaining about conditions in-theater. Although senior officials at the Pentagon were making glowing public statements about morale, Stripes decided to take a closer look.


Over the next few weeks, teams of Stripes correspondents fanned out across Iraq to assess how troops were faring, surveying some 2,000 American servicemen and women. Published last October as part of a series titled "Ground Truth," the results were alarming. Among other findings, nearly one third of all Army troops surveyed rated their unit's morale as "low" or "very low." Forty percent of those surveyed said that what they were doing was not close to or had nothing to do with what they had trained for, and a similar number said their missions were not clearly defined – fanning fears that reenlistments would drop steeply, exacerbating the military's post-9/11 overstretch.