Jan. 1, 2005 — Matt Pottinger was a reporter, but he's no longer so sure that the pen is mightier than the sword.

The 32-year-old former Wall Street Journal reporter has joined the U.S. Marines.

In seven years covering China for The Wall Street Journal, Pottinger got a sense of how American liberties are a rarity in the world — especially when he got arrested for writing about corruption.

"I was standing over a toilet," he recalled, "with a bunch of Chinese policemen standing around me shredding my notebook, page by page, and flushing it down a toilet."

From afar he could assess America's strengths and its weaknesses.

"I would come home, and you didn't feel coming home to the United States from abroad that we were a country at war," he said. "I was surprised by that … and that disturbed me. It gave me a sense that we were being a little bit too complacent."

It's hard to pinpoint the genesis of his decision to join the Marines. Maybe it was the murder of his colleague Daniel Pearl. Maybe it was the night he saw a video on the Web of the beheading of an American in Iraq.

"I watched it," he said, "and it was so obscene and so deeply disturbing to me that I felt a bit of the terror."...

..."It's an honor, you know, to get somebody from the dark side to come over to our side."...