I can say from personal experience that wearing a uniform wasn't popular during or even for some time after Viet Nam. But, having said that, I don't believe most of the protesters really knew whT they were protesting about.

I had a lady friend who gets all wound up about The School of the Americas, an international military school for what I suspect are the elite of the South and Central American states. Initially formed in Panama, it transferred up to Ft. Benning in Georgia when we relinquished our contol over Panama. Since all of the military dictators of this region have attended this school, she assumes that torture and killing is all that is taught there, and many demonstrators believing the same have been arrested for trespassing at Ft. Benning.

When is was briefly in Panama, I had the opportunity to visit the school, and I had a good friend who was transfered into the same base as I, from the school. For these reasons as well as my belief in our military system, I don't believe this school was set up solely to teach torture and murder. I do feel that many of the graduates improvised on what they had been taught to insure their rise in power, more because they were inherently evil than from whatever they learned there.

Some of the things I know were taught there were the things any serviceman needs to know about living and working effectively in the field, and fighting a war under those conditions. This runs the gamut from learning how to march - marching being one of the easier ways of moving a group of people between two points, in good order - to methods of constructing a field expedient privy - sanitation is very important in the field to maintain readiness. It's tough to try to perform ones duties while racked with dysentary, cholera, or malaria.

My friend was an electronics instructor, and since he had the same work experience as me, more than likely taught the theory and repair od the equipment that the US gave their air forces and army. Can these radios be used for torture? Sure they can, but the air hose you use to fill up your tires is just as effective and far cheaper. Small rods of the sort used to clean rifles can double for middle eastern interrogation/torture devices, but it is the person weilding the equipment and not his training that turns his equipment to these uses.

The army certainly didn't teach the guards at Al Graib prison to torture their prisoners, even as a method of making them more amenable to interrogation. Those folks did this mostly on their own, with perhaps some suggestions from their civilian interrogators - can you say CIA? Mind you the means used on those prisoners was far less severe than those used bu the Hussein regime.

Dave