Keeping it unreal

With today being the observance of Veterans' Day in the USA, Dan Froomkin's White House Briefing column at the Washington Post marked it by an excerpt from a soldier's first person account of life in Iraq. In what would count as an insult, except that the soldier (Sharon Allen) more than likely doesn't care, the Post has decided that its readers can't handle the full language in the excerpt; remember these are soldiers who've seen the type of horror that we don't see on our TV screens, and would have nightmares for weeks afterwards if we did:

Jake is one of my best friends out here, and one of the most infuriating people I've ever known. Jake's a former Marine who comes from a Marine family and whose biggest regret is that this isn't "a real war," something on the scale of World War II or Vietnam. I usually point out to him that we didn't lose many people in the first few years of Vietnam, either. And then I say something about how I'm really [expletive deleted by washingtonpost.com] sorry that not enough of us have died for him to consider this a real war. If I had met Jake in a bar in the States and he had said half the bullshit he says here, well, we definitely would not have become friends. But he's here, too, so I guess he's entitled to his opinion. His son, Joey, will be joining us when he gets out of Basic. I wonder if his opinion will change then.

So the BS word is in, but presumably the f word is out. The phrasing of the deletion implies that Froomkin wanted to include it, but Post editors took it out. Truly absurd.