From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Bob Garfield.

This week, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put his foot in it following an unexpected question from an unexpected quarter.

Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromise

ballistic glass to up armor our vehicles and why don't we have those resources readily

available to us?

To which Rumsfeld replied,

It's a matter of production and capability of doing it. As you know, you go to war

with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time. For us,

it offered more than insight into the mind of the Secretary of Defense. It demonstrated an unexpected

benefit of embedding reporters

with our troops. In this case, the reporter, Lee Pitts of the Chattanooga Times Free Press,

had embedded that question with a soldier. On Wednesday, he sent this letter to a colleague at his

paper. He wrote, I just had one of my best days as a journalist today. As luck

would have it, our journey north was delayed just long enough so I could attend a visit today here

by Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. I was told yesterday that only soldiers could ask questions, so I brought

two of them along with me as my escorts. Beforehand, we worked on questions

to ask Rumsfeld about the appalling lack of armor their vehicles going into combat have. Pitz wrote his

colleague that he'd been trying to get the story of inadequate armor out for weeks, and in fact,

his paper had printed two stories about it. But now the national press was all over it, and that

he said felt great. Quote, this is what the job is all about. People need to know. The soldier who

asked the question said he felt good because he took his complaints to the top. When he got back

to his unit, most of the guys patted him on the back.

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