Marines and Motherfuckers

About three paragraphs into the story I was writing on a the homecoming party for a squad of local Marines, my editor popped her head around the cubicle with a suggestion:

"Do you think you could take out the drinking and the swearing?" she asked. We were, she reminded me, a family newspaper. (Note: It's been a couple years since I worked there.)

I've never figured out what that means, exactly, a "family newspaper." We printed some grisly stuff: car and train wrecks, blood stains on sidewalk, skeletons of houses gutted by fire.

And marines are vulgar. Take away the drinking, swearing, crude talk of sex and how it relates to consuming a Jello-shot, and you have something more bland, less real. (My marine friends call this the Army). These men had just come back from their second tour in Iraq. Foul language was the least of their issues.

Pat Thornton sent me on this nostalgia trip with his post this morning, noting that Stars & Stripes grapples with the same issue:

My paper is willing to print “shit” in a story but only in certain editions. Our Mideast edition is keeping the word, while our editions in Europe and the Pacific are dropping it. The Web will not feature the word as well. ... The expletive was left in the Mideast edition because it’s a theater of war. The feeling was that troops in combat have a different community standard than those living on base with their families.

As much as it is our job, as journalists, to promote civic and civil debate, to calm the passions of our readers with facts and with reason, to enlighten, we're also in the business of saying it like it is.

We're not the Family Channel.

Before: Slouching towards Beijing | After: The view from here