The fallacy you are looking for: Hasty Generalization

Interesting post, one of a series on war memoirs over at "On Violence" asks the following question:

Given only pictures of combat at its worst, we, the American public, the world, extrapolate that all of Afghanistan (or Iraq) is war at its worst. I’m sure there is a fallacy here, but I don’t know its proper name. (Reverse synecdoche?) The America media diet consists mostly of combat, and ignores the 2.5 people behind every combat soldier..

..This distortion hits all deploying or deployed soldier on a personal level. Every time Michael C or I told someone he was deploying to Iraq, we would get a shocked look of concern. They assumed he was going to battle. In truth, as he wrote about here, he was a Fobbit.

One might also add that such memoirs not only cause people to generalize from the instances to the whole in this further way: Afghanistan and Iraq are hell holes as wholes.

The logical fallacy is 'hasty generalization' which, from the looks of the link provided for the term 'reverse synecdoche' seems to be family related to the latter, which is itself a term of art from linguistics, not logic.