Lepus Rex:

Hey, my brother, step back for just a minute, if you will and consider the following:

You would make choice #2 from a much different perspective than the twenty-something and teenagers who are in Iraq. Their perspective does not give them the wisdom that someone who lived thru the Vietnam War would have. And your perspective is not one formed in video arcades where violence is sanitized and at the end of the game no one is really dead or injured and every one goes home at night.

When you couple that to the excellent PR work the Bush machine has pumped out ("with us or against us", "evil dictator", "gassed his own people", "mushroon cloud over our head", etc, etc.) and the bold satements that this war was just going to be a mop up operation, these kids really haven't been put in a position to make choices.

And many of these kids enrolled in the military as a way to get out of the ghetto. They were highly recruited in their impressionable years in high school and they never thought that anyopne would come along and get the US into a ground war. Look at the high percentage of black folks and minorities and you'll see what I mean. They just got caught up in some funky sh*t.

So, my friend, I would hope that you would try to see the trap in which these kids got caught and not impose your wisdom and life's experiences on these kids.

The blame falls squarely on those of our generation.

Peace,

Bobert