Bring back the burgers - Navy Community - discussions, photos, video - Navy Times

Bring back the burgers

If any troops could use a morale boost, it’s those fighting the increasingly dangerous war in Afghanistan.

Army Gen. David Petraeus, their new commander, may be about to give them one.

Military sources say Petraeus is “seriously considering” reversing an order issued earlier this year by the departed Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal that closed dozens of concessions on U.S. bases in Afghanistan, including popular fast-food outlets such as Burger King, Taco Bell and Popeyes.

McChrystal’s rationale was that these concessions, run by the Army and Air Force Exchange Service, took troops’ minds off what they really needed to be thinking about.

“MWR programs across the theater should be limited in scope and tailored for an expeditionary force,” he said. “MWR should never be the distracter that changes the focus of the mission.”

The order was an overreach from a longtime special operator for whom Spartan environments were a way of life.

But troops who have deployed multiple times to Afghanistan don’t need such a gut-punch reminder that they’re on a tough expeditionary mission in a forbiddingly austere country.

It’s difficult to see how stripping the small pleasure of a Whopper from an infantryman just in from a hard patrol outside the wire could obscure that fact.

McChrytal’s order was doubly disheartening because concessions operating under the auspices of NATO allies in Afghanistan remain in full vigor — as they do on U.S. bases in Iraq — with no obvious detrimental effects.

The exchange services exist to support U.S. troops wherever they go, including forward-deployed areas.

Petraeus should allow AAFES to fulfill its mission — and make U.S. troops feel just a little better in the course of fulfilling theirs.