Who are our soldiers?

Michelle Malkin did a very intense post based upon the "gushing article" Bob Herbert, of the NY Times, wrote regarding Aidan Delgado, a conscientious objector. One of the things that's striking about Herbert's article is how Delgado describes American soldiers as consistently acting like sadistic lunatics (sort of like Hussein's sons), and imposing their sadism on the population at large. For example, he allegedly reported the following to Herbert:

"Guys in my unit, particularly the younger guys, would drive by in their Humvee and shatter bottles over the heads of Iraqi civilians passing by. They'd keep a bunch of empty Coke bottles in the Humvee to break over people's heads."

As Malkin points out, a lot of bloggers have already discredited these stories. (See, for example, OTB, Juliette Ochieng and Blackfive.) I can't add to this and I won't go there. I would like to say that the following picture tracks much more closely with my sense of American soldiers. The Reuters' caption for this sad photograph is

Picture released by the U.S. Army Tuesday, May 3, 2005 shows a U.S. Army soldier comforting a child fatally wounded in a car bomb blast in Mosul, 360 km (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May 2, 2005. 15 Iraqis were wounded in the combined suicide bomb attack. (AP Photo/U.S. Army)

It's going to take a lot more than Delgado to make me believe that our armed forces are sadistic nutcases. UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has picked up on the same photograph and to the same point -- that it is probably more representative of most American trips than the anti-American polemics filling the MSM.