It is what it is.

The AP acted properly by running the photo of the wounded Marine. At best, it lends the article credibility. At worst, poignancy.

The objections of a soldier’s family to the publication of such images should be irrelevant to a news organization’s ultimate decision. Against the backdrop of the Afghan pomegranate grove, the story is not the final chapter of one Marine’s biography; it is but one page from the history of a real-live war. As citizens of a country which has invested so much, that young man’s experience belongs to all of us.

To compare an image of a mortally wounded soldier to a sensitively framed snapshot of a fatal car wreck on a local highway is to be mistaken. War is not the simple matter of failing to negotiate a curve on the way home from the bar, and Lance Cpl. Joshua Bernard did not become the news by a moment of driver carelessness, or even rotten luck. He entered history not as the son of John and Sharon Bernard, but as a figure set in a far greater and decidedly newsworthy context.

Many declare but few attempt to explain the disrespect that the image purportedly inflicts upon the memory of Bernard. The AP performed its journalistic duty through its serious and thoughtful treatment of difficult material that bears painful albeit honest witness to man’s potential to do evil. A thousand readers gazing at a picture of a young man’s life cut short may derive from it a thousand different words, but for all, this sentiment is the same: “It is what it is.”