Funny thing, really, when you think about it, a day to honor all those who died in defence of this country.
The funny thing is, that in most cases, people today have no clue as to where, when or why these people died.
Ask a twenty something about Vietnam, and they are likely as not tell you they dont know.
The same is true for the Korean war.
World war two is a little better known, but still many have no clue as to why we were even involved.
The sad fact is that except for Memorial Day, these fallen men and women are forgotten. The battles they fought are just names on a map somewhere that people had to know in order to pass High School history.
You mention Omaha Beach or Normandy, and people look at you funny. Talk about Midway and people think you are talking about the state fair or something.
Oh people remember 9/11, but forget about Pearl Harbor.
The thing about it, is that having seen combat myself, I kind of get real mad when these people protest about the war, not because I think we should be over there, but because they really have no clue as to what it means to be on the sharp end.
Criticize the soldiers and you can really get me mad. It wasnt the military that sent the men into harm's way, it was the politicians. One politician, G. W. Bush, President.
He basically sent our military into a country that had no connection to Bin Laden and was no threat to anyone. 3,435 Americans died because the republican party screwed the pooch.
If the Iraqi military was such a powerful threat, it would have taken a lot longer than 20 days to get from the Saudi and Kuwaiti border to Baghdad. It was not the fact our troops were better, it was the fact that after years of trade sanctions, the fact the Iraqi army could never really rebuild after losing 60% of its military hardware in the first gulf war, there was nothing left to fight with.
Some military threat there.
Now, Afghanistan on the other hand had confirmed Terrorist training camps, openly protected Bin Laden, and was fully a threat to the US, in the fact it supported the terrorists.
Now, Iraq has become just what MOST of the military commanders told president bush it would become, a guerilla war that is going to make Vietnam look like a bar room brawl.
You see, in Vietnam, the NVA and VC did not have this idology of dieing for god or Ho Chi Min, they believed as Patton did, make the other poor son of a bitch die for his country.
In Iraq, a suicide bomber believes they go straight to paradise. Makes for a lot of funatics to deal with. You cannot beat an enemy that believes in that philosophy. It is useless to even try.
I support our troops, but I cannot support the decision that put them in Iraq. I feel we should make a big effort to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure as fast as possible then get out. If the guerilla fighters have a chance to see that we are doing exactly what we said we were going to do, and if we could involve the rest of the Muslim countries in the process, we could be out of Iraq in just over two years, with a major drop in causalties.
