Free Republic

A legendary Special Forces commander was quietly forced to leave the U.S. Army after he admitted to a love affair with a Washington Post war correspondent, who quit her job to secretly live with him for almost a year in one of the most dangerous combat outposts in Afghanistan. U.S. Army Special Operations Command never publicly disclosed that highly-decorated Green Beret Major Jim Gant was relieved of command at the end of a harrowing 22 months in combat in March 2012. His commanders charged in confidential files that he had "indulged in a self-created fantasy world" of booze, pain pills...

... First, the sheer adventure. Gant is a mountain man, circa 1840. He is Jeremiah Johnson, living in the wrong century. Despite his heavy drinking, volcanic mood swings and numerous wounds, he survived more than 40 months of combat. In 2003 and again in 2011, he and a dozen Special Forces soldiers lived in a mountain village in eastern Afghanistan, adjacent to the Pakistan border. When I visited that village, both the elders and the soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry told tales about Gant’s exploits. He captured one insurgent after a two-day chase. Another time, he...

Let me be clear about what I’m writing here. This is not only a story about disgraced U.S. Army Special Forces major James Gant. This is also a story about a story about Jim Gant. On March 24, David Wood at Huffington Post published a glowing profile of Gant that carefully, even elegantly, talks around the shocking reality of Gant’s rise and fall as a commando officer in the Afghanistan war. Gant had invited his girlfriend Ann Scott Tyson, a Washington Post reporter, to accompany him and his team on secret missions in a remote province in eastern Afghanistan in...

The Washington Post raised eyebrows when it assigned Ann Scott Tyson to review former Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger’s posthumously published new book, "Home of the Brave: Honoring the Unsung Heroes in the War on Terror." Weinberger’s last work has already been widely praised by former Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, the 28th Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps, General P.X. Kelley (ret.), the 2.4 million-member Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) and conservative media superstar Sean Hannity...