it is that fucking simple

Jesus this is a distressing article.

...people who have worn the uniform, myself among them, are almost all anti-war.

I keep being reminded of the Air Force that my father served for 43 years, the slogan of Stragic Air Command. There was a diagonal sky blue stripe across the nose of the B-47s, and later B-52s, with the proud words, "Peace Is Our Profession."

assholes of two kinds in America

Kind one is the old fashioned chickenshit chickenhawk, the entire W administration just about, with few exceptions, were all non combat personnel.

Not new but lots of them.

Kind two is the idiot who has played video games all his life, watched movies where the bad guys are always Muslim or non white american, and this gun nut who thinks he is John Wayne even if he is too young to know who that is, joins up so he can kill Muslims.

some of them just get killed or become frightened (for good reason) right off, some of them become killers...

Wow, how fucked up is this world?

whenever anyone would spout their support for war, I would give them the application.
Not 1 person ever signed up, but the look on their faces and the excuses I heard were priceless.

If you want war, shut the fuck up, suit up, and take your ass along with your entire family there to fight it. Leave the rest of us alone. It's not okay to cheer for war for other people because you will NEVER suffer the devastation.

Suit up or shut up.

The sooner raging pro-war fuckheads lie dead in the battlefields they wished for, the sooner the rest of us can live in much-deserved peace.

Was Czech, and the things he experienced during the German invasion never left him. I, on the other hand, served in Iraq, so I guess the lessons didn't stick. Just to pay for collage, I said. There's nothing going on in the world where I'll have to fight, I said...I was wrong, and now I'll never be totally right again.

The emotional baggage has to be considered, doesn't it?

There is not an American alive today who has experienced bombs and bloodletting and white phosphorus weapons and giving birth to monsters because of the depleted uranium - all of it, right here in their own community, on their own street. Real war is only an abstraction to them.

And I fully believe the people like Cheney and GWB and Rummy and others sit somewhere and jag-off to films and pictures of the horror. It's an aphrodisiac to them.


* * *

My mother lived in Ukraine during the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed. She lost both her parents, within hours of each other, to the typhus epidemic. And that is the smallest part of her story.

She carried severe emotional baggage for the rest of her life that impacted me and my children and those around her. For 100 years.

When I look at that little girl in her mother's arms I think of my mother, and the people who are likely to suffer the consequences of what she experienced for the next hundred years. But no one ever thinks of that.

I curse the people who perpetrate these wars. May they (and that includes Americans) rot in everlasting Hell for all eternity.

Were children of World War II (Italy) as well - It does something to children.

Not in my name!

small percentage of the population--servicepersons and their families--they don't have to experience the impact
of the war.

Many Americans slap a "Support our troops" magnet on their SUV or other vehicle and apparently think that means something.