Joshua Greene faced a barrage of criticism after his story about an unidentified soldier being shipped off to Iraq appeared. Soldiers and others insinuated "that I or the soldier or both made the whole story up," Greene wrote in a follow-up column. "Nobody, they say, ever jumped out of a plane 4,426 times. Okay. Maybe it was a helicopter." In Greene's favor, a chaplain called to say the story had resonance, even if the number of jumps was incorrect. "And maybe I'm a flawed journalist, 'cause as the man [the soldier identified only as "Babe"] packed up his house, I didn't call him a liar enough as I sat complicit in sending him to war," Greene muses. The Free Times published a number of letters from readers questioning the story.
