They'll give the pilot a medal and his enlisted ground crew a handshake.

Wired.com is reporting that last month a U.S. fighter jet shot down an unmanned Iranian drone flying over Iraq. The article mentions how the "Obama administration is looking for ways to reach out to the Tehran regime -- dangling invitations to international conferences, and offering promises of renewed relations. Which means the drone incident comes at a particularly sensitive time."

If anything, I'd think this would bolster our footing in advance of potential diplomatic talks. It's like saying, "We'll talk with you, but we are still capable of destroying you if you mess with our affairs."

But I'm more interested in the personal aspect of this. I'm sure the pilot who shot that thing down is pretty stoked. His head is probably so big it barely fits inside the cockpit. Fighter pilots are confident enough when they're not in the air, so imagine how bad it gets when they actually accomplish something.

It's like when I was in Iraq: you do routine patrols and go on a few special missions occasionally, but the war there is in such a passive state that you really have to get lucky to get the chance to annihilate something. And everyone around you wants the same thing you do, so if you're not in the immediate vicinity when it goes down, someone else is gonna beat you to it. You've just gotta be in the right place at the right time to justify to yourself why you're there. I sure didn't join the Marines to sit around Camp Lejeune for four years -- I joined it to travel abroad and destroy things.

Speaking of which, I'm deploying to Afghanistan in about three weeks, and I'm pretty sure I haven't mentioned that here. So if you think the updates here are infrequent now, just you wait.