'I'm a door kicker-inner,' one young Marine blurted out - to the dismay of his superiors

"“WHY can’t we live together in peace?”, read the graffiti written on a wall in Fallujah by a weary American soldier. Next to it a colleague had scrawled: “Die ragheads die!”

The US military has struggled to improve the cultural sensitivity of its troops — often raw youths on their first trip abroad — since the start of the occupation when the first soldiers to hit Baghdad slipped a Stars and Stripes over the head of Saddam Hussein’s statue. Jittery superiors swiftly ordered them to replace it with an Iraqi flag.

Long before the Abu Ghraib scandal, there were numerous examples of brutality and insensitivity by US troops to match tales of their courage. Sometimes it was purely a lack of local knowledge: a minor riot ensued when dogs — considered unclean in the Muslim world — were used to sniff staff entering the Oil Ministry. "
Times Online

I've kicked in a door or two, and I've never been to a war zone. Yet if you get past the tone of this story, there is an important message in there.*

*Explanation for some of my more sensitive readers.