Poor old VC winner_Willie. He is in the firing line from all sides.
Having had a brother be deployed in a military capacity to the front lines of Afghanistan a few years back in what was then called the first wave of "provincial reconstruction" I am in a slightly biased position here.

Whilst I dont necessarily agree with what is going on in Afghanistan from any angle for any given period of time over the last 50 or so years, it seems to be abit irresponsible of the press to be putting individual soldiers in the spotlight such as this. I think there is a clear division between individual and state in situations such as these.

The internet has made the world a very small place over the last decade and media content is no longer contained to the population is was originally published for. This story has been picked up the world over now, and I am sure that all of this fuss has made for not only some great headlines but also just added to the level of inherent danger Corp.Willie_Apiata is in.

Yesterday the NZ Government suggested that Corp.Willie_Apiata could have done more to conceal his identity whilst on deployment. Perhaps the best way this could have been achieved was just to not turn all of this into a media frenzy by continuing to feed this story.

As a frontline soldier I would imagine that there are not a lot of options for concealing ones identity other than growing out your hair and growing a beard, both of which he has done.  Had the press not picked up on this and turned it into a headline making opportunity I am sure most of us would not have made the connection between this soldier and the clean cut man paraded infront of us last year. To the average viewer this man is not even a member of what we have been conditioned to accept as the NZ soldier. He wears non regulation uniform with no obvious national identifying patches, and he carries a weapon that we don't associate as being current NZ issue (those being the much different looking Steyr AUG).

This just illustrates to me perfectly the place we have arrived at within our society when it comes to sensationalisation, the cult of celebrity and what is perceived to be an individuals sense of self worth.  The media obviously values their collective rights to headlines over and above an individuals rights to self preservation.

I am just seemingly perpetuating the problem, but the image I have used has no tags linking the soldier in question to his full name, nor have I used his full name in the article or in the meta tags without adding in a layer of confusion. I have done this by converting his name as it would be searched into a long string of characters by using a fullstop and hyphens to join all of the components together.