In December 2004, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld lectured American troops worried about vital equipment shortages plaguing U.S. combat forces in Iraq. "You go to war with the army you have," Rumsfeld pontificated, "not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time."
Now, Republicans are learning, Rumsfeld's condescending maxim applies to the soldiers themselves. Apoplectic that the Obama administration like so many before it exchanged enemy prisoners for an American POW, conservatives are blasting Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl as a deserter, a traitor and worse. But whatever Bergdahl's personal struggles and the details of his capture may have been, the American commitment to leave no man behind doesn't have an asterisk next to it. And when only one percent of the nation takes up arms in its defense, the other 310 million-plus Americans' first reaction should be gratitude for their service, not second-guessing.
And what goes for our supposed villains applies to our heroes as well. Ten years ago in April, Army Ranger Pat Tillman was killed in a friendly fire incident in Afghanistan that the Pentagon and the Bush administration tried for years to cover up. But when Americans learned that Tillman opposed the war in Iraq and was an atheist, many of the same voices of the right declared it simply couldn't be so. Ranger Tillman, it turned out, called the Bush administration's drive to war in Iraq "illegal and unjust," an "imperial folly that was doing long-term damage to US interests." As Dave Zirin recalled in 2005, that was more than some of Tillman's conservative hagiographers could stomach:

"I don't believe it," seethed Ann Coulter.
Her contempt was directed at a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle story reporting that former NFL star and Army Ranger war hero Pat Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan last year, believed the US war on Iraq was "f***ing illegal" and counted Noam Chomsky among his favorite authors. It must have been quite a moment for Coulter, who upon Tillman's death described him in her inimitably creepy fashion as "an American original--virtuous, pure and masculine like only an American male can be." She tried to discredit the story as San Francisco agitprop, but this approach ran into a slight problem: The article's source was Pat Tillman's mother, Mary.

Tillman's brother and fellow Ranger Richard presented a problem for those who tried to cover up Tillman's death and misappropriate his life. As he bluntly put it at his older brother's public memorial service:

"He's not with God, he's fucking dead. He's not religious. Thanks for your thoughts, but he's fucking dead."

But for the right-wing historical revisionism project that is Conservapedia ("Pat Tillman Was Not An Atheist"), the truth about Tillman's faith (or lack of it) from his own family was simply unbearable.
So, too, is the sobering thought that the lives of American soldiers were lost in the effort to rescue Bowe Bergdahl. Their loss is irreplaceable and immeasurable. The cost is made higher by the exchange of five Taliban prisoners in order to save this one soldier, a painful reminder of wounds from 9/11 still unhealed.
But we have always paid that price. Americans leave no soldier behind. Whether we like him or not.