I reached my breaking point last night. 

I mean, it's bad enough that a popular program like "24" is so obviously a FOX-news mouthpiece that they actually invited the stars of the fictional-story show to appear at a conference on national security, and it's a well-known fact that the program is one of Dick Cheney's favorites.  But I didn't expect to get blind-sided by CBS-TV's THE UNIT.

Having spent my entire life surrounded by military men and combat veterans, I usually have a different take on military stories than most women.  I read military history--for pleasure, often ordering a book and reading it first and then passing it on to my husband and father, and now, my son.  I've read books about World War II and books about Iraq.  It interests me.

I like war movies, usually, and would much rather watch a show like THE UNIT than, say, DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES.  I watch military documentaries.  And I've been following this war in the major papers and bestsellers since it began.

AND I have been opposed to this war since Bush and Cheney first started making little war-noises, at Republican FUND-RAISERS before the 2002 elections.  I have been speaking out about it since before my son and nephew even enlisted in the Marines.  Recently, when my brother-in-law, the retired army special forces brigadier general and his wife came out for a visit, I not only made no attempt to hide such things as the poster that shows a cargo plane-full of flag-draped coffins over the word HUBRIS, but I spent hours and hours discussing the war with him because I respected his opinion.  He, in turn, respected mine.  In fact, he was frankly surprised at how well-informed I was.

I have sent more funny cards, jokes, letters, and care packages to soldiers and Marines than I can count.  I do it privately and at great personal expense because I know that it is the job of a soldier and Marine to follow orders.  What decisions are made by morons in charge of this war are not their fault.  So I see no divide between "supporting the troops" and going to war on behalf of the warriors by trying to bring them home.

In a card to my nephew recently, the one who's deployed now with the army, I said, "I pray for you every day, honey.  It remains to be seen whether God listens to Democrats."  And I drew a self-portrait of me, laughing.  I knew he'd get a kick out of that.

The thing is, there are people opposed to this war who cut across all sorts of layers.  Some are straight-up pacifists who oppose war of any kind on principle, period.  Some are more in line with Sen. Barack Obama, who said, "I'm not opposed to all wars.  What I am opposed to is a dumb war.  What I am opposed to is a rash war."

Then there are those who, like me, either come from a military family or who have themselves served, who feel a great sense of personal outrage at the way the armed forces of this great nation have been abused, asked to carry the staggering load for a war that has dragged on longer than WWII and cost more than Vietnam and Korea combined, but who represent less than one percent of a population who was directed by their president--not to sacrifice for the greater good--but to go shopping.  Go to Disneyworld, he said.

While my family went to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Over and over and over and over again, playing Russian Roulette with their lives while the Bush twins partied.

So, back to THE UNIT.

I've been watching it since it debuted.  Until this year, it had the all-time BEST theme song of any T.V. show I'd ever seen, sung to a hard-hitting military cadence.  "The Unit" is supposed to be based on the army's Delta Force, a super top-secret, very elite force of fighting men who are sent out on dangerous and secret missions all over the world.

It's fiction, of course.  I knew that the first episode.  I was joking in a letter to my son, who was deployed at the time.  I told him that, apparently, special forces soldiers were HEROES who risked their lives EVERY SINGLE DAY while their longsuffering wives suffered alone at home.  I knew he would laugh, because his other cousin had been deployed to Afghanistan with army special forces and had somehow managed to call his wife EVERY DAY.

Not that he wasn't risking his life, too.  I'm just saying.

And, how annoying is it that, on T.V. now that we're FIVE YEARS into this war, somehow, the troops in Iraq are STILL LIVING IN TENTS?

Yeah, I mean, I have never once seen a fictional Iraq war scene that even shows five minutes on one of those massive bases with Internet cafes, fast-food restaurants, and in some, swimming pools.

I mean, even if they're staying in crappy F.O.B.'s (forward operating bases) like my son and my nephew now deployed--still, they are abandoned buildings.  The guys move in, fortify them with sandbags, hook up generators, and turn them into makeshift bases.

But watch any war story on T.V. and in many movies, and man, here we go with the windy dusty tents.  I just watched one in which even the surgical hospital was a tent.

But I can forgive them for not bothering to ask, apparently, any Iraq veterans what a typical base or F.O.B. looks like.  It's the story that matters, right?

And on THE UNIT, they had this famous, spoiled celebrity singer who was supposed to remind us, I guess, of Britney Spears, and it was the unit's assignment to guard her while she was flown into a relatively hot zone to entertain the troops.  And of course she was a raving bitch, throwing fits, carrying around a little yappy dog, trying to seduce soldiers, and not giving a damn about where she was or what she was doing.

First of all, that premise alone is faulty.  Not to defend rich bitch celebrities, but any entertainer I have ever heard of who has flown in with Bob Hope or any part of a U.S.O. tour or any form of entertaining troops--is deeply, deeply effected by the experience.  This is common to the human condition, period.  Sing for troops who may go out that night or the next day and die--it does something to you.

But oh no, not our fictional bitch.  No, she was hell on wheels, straight down the line, and she didn't care who she hurt or why.  Okay, fine.

But that wasn't enough for the writers of THE UNIT.

No, there had to be a speech given by the sergeant who is the star of the show, who was at the time being given an ass-chewing because he refused to kowtow to the celebrity in order to keep her safe.

And he said--and I'm paraphrasing--something like, "What we have here is an ANTI-WAR celebrity who the Pentagon thinks would make P.R if they send her to the front and show her holding the troops' hands and singing for them."

Oooookay.

I get it now.  She wasn't just celebrity bitch.  She was ANTI-WAR.

Of course she was.  That explained everything about her abominable behavior.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

She demands, see, that they permit her to go out on patrol, and of course, they refuse.  Then the base gets mortared--real bad, which wrecks havoc on all those tents dontcha know--and a couple of humvees take off in a cloud of dust to go after the bad guys who are attacking the post, and the little girl suddenly JUMPS INTO A HUMVEE WITH THE TROOPS and leaves with a flirty little wave at the sergeant.

First of all.

Oh lord there's so much I hardly know where to begin.

Star-spangled though those boys may be by raging hormones and a bitchy whore celebrity in their midst, but excuuuuse me?  They are PROFESSIONALS.

Soldiering is what they do.  And what they DON'T do is take ANYONE out on patrol who is NOT WEARING BODY ARMOR OR EVEN SO MUCH AS A HELMET, certainly not when they are in hot pursuit of post attackers.

But this is fiction so what the hell.  She gets to go joy-riding!

Sgt. takes out after her.  The humvees come under vicious attack; the one she's in goes into a roll off the road, blah blah.

She survives the crash without a scratch because this is fiction, and of course, cowers down, and one of the guys trying to protect her is shot.

Sgt. drags her to safety, puts a helmet on her, one of his men drags the wounded man by their car, heavy fire all around.

She holds the dying soldier's hand.  He sings a bar or two from one of her hit songs; asks if she'd write a letter to his mama.  Dies.

Fast-forward back on post.

Has this profoundly life-changing experience changed the life of the bitch-whore war-protester?

Not only no, but HELL NO.

She asks why the guy got shot, she's told because he was heading back to the vehicle for more ammunition.  She asks why one of the unit risked his life to go get him.

Stop a minute.  Yeah, she ASKED.  Like she just didn't GET IT.

When the longsuffering heroic sergeant explained it's because we never leave a man behind or some such thing, her response is SCORNFUL, like that was the stupidest thing she had ever heard.

In the end, true to character, she stole a spiral notebook that one of the troops was writing poetry in.  Stole it, waved it at him out the window as the chopper took off.

Turned one of the poems into a number-one hit song.  Did not, of course, give him credit or any financial compensation.

And of course, it was a patriotic war-song, which made her even more cynical and hellish than she already was.

And that's when I realized that it does not seem to be ENOUGH that these fictional programs take every single solder or Marine who ever fought and turns him or her into a HERO, which the guys themselves will tell you is bullshit--it's not enough that they ROMANTICIZE AND GLAMORIZE WAR.

No, that's not enough to turn fiction into propaganda.

They have to reference every single anti-war spokesman or protester and turn them into either pot-wasted longhair hippy-freaks who hate America, or opportunistic money-grubbing reprehensible toads.

I have crafted and published ten suspense thrillers in my career.  I wrote into those stories many a bad guy character.  I would like to preface this by saying that, in my entire career, I never received ONE negative or poor professional review, and on Amazon.com, readers give my books, on average, always four or five stars.

So I think I can be trusted when I say that the best bad guys in the world are NUANCED.  They have something about them that makes them sympathetic to the reader or viewer, something that makes them HUMAN.

And good guys are not heroic cardboard cut-outs.  They are fallible human beings with faults and character flaws that make them loveable.

It's not that David Mamet, one of the finest playwrights and screenwriters of this age, does not realize this.  He is the creator and was one of the original writers for THE UNIT, and one reason it was so good and caught my attention.

What I want to know is...Are studio executives FORCING writers to take war stories and make them little more than recruiting posters?

Or are we, as a society, somehow incapable of looking at our soldiers and Marines as real live human beings who screw up sometimes and do bad things now and then?  Can we not HANDLE a sympathetic war protester--even, maybe, a military mom?

I gotta say, as an aside, how much I appreciate what ABC-TV's "BROTHERS AND SISTERS" has done with the story-line of a real-live family and their son who did one tour in Afghanistan as a medic and came home messed up by what he'd seen, only to be sent on to IRAQ. 

The scene where Sally Field sank down onto the kitchen floor and wept and said, "I can't believe I have to go through this again," was one of the most powerful I ever saw anywhere, and the good-bye scene at the airport was so profoundly REAL that I broke down completely watching it.

THEY had the guts to show the REAL toll that war takes, and they also pointed out that this son was PROUD of his service and READY to return to war when the time came.

These issues are complicated, complex, messy, convoluted, REAL.

Why oh why did CBS seem to think it necessary to create this paper-doll hate-filled entertainer who didn't even ring true, and then, if that wasn't enough, turn her into an anti-war celebrity?

That scene, in which he claimed she was anti-war, was utterly unnecessary to the plot.  Nobody, in fact, behaved in a realistic manner, and I must add that I was appalled that they portrayed fighting soldiers as too stupid and star-struck to grab up a little lady and toss her bodily out of the humvee before taking off to ENGAGE THE ENEMY.

These things are not done.  These people are not real and do not exist.  And the network must surely KNOW that.

This fine program, spawned by the incomparable David Mamet, deserves better.  Its stars deserve better.  WE deserve better.

And by God, the troops deserve better too.

Because as long as T.V., which is seen by many many more people than most movies, continues to treat this war as a recruiting poster and its warriors as comic-book heros and those with serious questions as heinous freaks...then we will ALL be hurt by it. 

And it will be that much easier to keep it going ANOTHER five years.