A photograph in Stripes' American Roundup feature November 13 troubled a letter-writer. The photo, from The Associated Press, showed a reserve soldier saying goodbye to his girlfriend, forehead-to-forehead, as he was being shipped off from South Bend, Ind., for more training before going to Iraq. The caption said the soldier was 22 years old, the girlfriend 17.

Sgt. Selena Coppa of Wiesbaden, Germany, accuses Stars and Stripes of a double standard. The paper writes hugely about demonstrations by populations overseas, she argues, but gives little notice to protests at home — specifically those that target U.S. military policy.

What set this off for Coppa was a big feature in Stripes last month that described South Koreans’ penchant for protest demonstrations of one kind or another. (Several of the protests have been against the U.S. Army in the country.)

"Doonesbury" is a perennially favorite topic for letter writers to Stars and Stripes. You either hate that studiously controversial comic strip, or you love it. You want Stripes to yank it, or you plead for it to stay in the name of free speech.

Attention to the strip and its creator, Garry Trudeau, welled up again in the letters columns recently. Readers unburdened themselves of mostly generic arguments about the strip’s supposed status as a vehicle of treason, or a treasure. What surprised me was that a great example of "Doonesbury’s" chutzpah went virtually unnoticed: It called the presidential election before it was held.

The dustup over Stars and Stripes' efforts to cover servicemembers' reactions on election night, and the Pentagon's efforts to prevent that, is not over yet. Stripes on Friday published four letters-to-the editor on the subject. They reacted to a news story that Stripes ran on Thursday, and a column I wrote as ombudsman that ran the same day. (See it below.)

On a night like no other when America’s open and democratic virtues were put on worldwide display, an ill-advised policy within the Department of Defense proclaimed to servicemembers and the news media alike: “No you can’t.” What a servicemember and a journalist couldn’t do, the policy drafters ordered, was engage in conversation on a military base as the returns from a momentous election rolled in.

Perhaps it was inevitable. In the worst days in Iraq, complaints multiplied about the media’s “negative” reporting of the war. There’s little of that now, as the situation improves there. Now, apparently, it’s the turn of Afghanistan, where the days may not be the worst they have been, but they are not good. In an interview given to The Associated Press on Oct. 26, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, blasted the media for pessimistic reports from that battleground, and he said he’s tired of it.