Good news for Corporal Marshall...

...but it shouldn't take local headlines to get decent treatment for our nation's warriors.

Cpl. Artist Marshall's father died homeless nearly a year ago at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, but it took eight months before his family learned the news. By then, the 23-year-old Marine had deployed to Iraq, and his mother chose not to tell him because she didn't want him to worry while he was in the middle of a war zone. Marshall finally found out this month through a friend of the family.

His unit in Iraq initially denied him an emergency leave typically granted to troops who lose an immediate family member. The reason, he said, was because his father had died so long ago.

After a Seattle Times article yesterday detailing the unusual circumstances, his unit approved his leave.

The lesson? If you know someone in Iraq, or someone returned from Iraq, or someone scheduled for deployment to Iraq, it's a reasonable assumption that Rummy's military will screw them over every time unless we make noise at home.

In every war, one of the questions is what do we do on the homefront to "support the troops." In the past, that's included things like buying war bonds and sending care packages. In this war, part of the answer is that it's our obligation to embarrass the government into providing decent treatment to those troops, because there seems to be no will in the DoD to do so without prompting.

I hate what they've done to my Army. And my brother's Marine Corps. And every man and woman in uniform.