I should feel honored, he responded to me directly.  Of course he grossly misquoted me.

I said that he was telling the troops to shut up and quit whining, whereas he quoted me as saying that to him.

Whatever.  the point of my article was that he maligned our troops with terms like mercenary, which he did.

And today he retracted that insult only to replace it with further insults:

The Arrogant and Intolerant Speak Out

Now if that isn’t the pot calling the kettle black….

Well, one thing’s abundantly clear about who will actually defend our rights to say what we believe: It isn’t the hundreds who have written me saying they are soldiers or veterans or war supporters or real Americans — who also advise me to move to another country, to get f@##d, or to die a painful, violent death.

Contrary to the typically inaccurate and overstated assertion in dozens of blogs, hundreds of comments, and thousands of e-mails I’ve received, I’ve never written that soldiers should "shut up," quit whining, be spit upon, or that they have no right to an opinion.

No, you just wanted their commanders to have taken "the soldiers aside after the story and explained to them why it wasn’t for them to disapprove of the American people", a one sided proposition. 

They can be accused of indiginties, they can be snidely told to be grateful they aren’t being spit at, even if they are, but God help them is they express opinions.

I said I was bothered by the notion that "the troops" were somehow becoming hallowed beings above society, that they had an attitude that only they had the means - or the right - to judge the worthiness of the Iraq endeavor.

Listen butthead, no one suggested that, but we do suggest that they may be in a unique position to understand the war and what the realities of it are since they are actually in it.

I was dead wrong in using the word mercenary to describe the American soldier today.