Just like most Americans, I have been following events in Iraq with a great deal of interest. I guess it helps that my physical health hasn't allowed me to do much else the past few days or so except watch in fascination as events unfold before my eyes.

I am constrained to by an almost overwhelming need to commit some of my thoughts on what I have been seeing, hearing and thinking the past few days and even weeks. I hope that my doing this will encourage others to write out their own thoughts, observations and feelings on what has been happening in our world. I have grouped my thoughts under general headings to give them some form. You need not be a great writer or wordsmith to do likewise with your thoughts.

The thoughts and observations of EVERYONE who visits here is both welcomed and encouraged. For once, I would prefer that no one comment on the thoughts and impressions posted by anyone else. Please, confine your comments to your thoughts and observations or simple statements of support or agreement. There is no "right" or "wrong" in these thoughts.

Is this the onset of Armeggedon?

From childhood I was raised with an appreciation of the Biblical tales significant to both of my parents and members of my family. I must confess a bit of limited knowledge on the subject of Armeggedon - the end times of mankind according to Biblical prognosications.

Personal observations over the years of the fanaticism of people of middle-eastern origin - including equally members of Jewish, Arabic and others races of the region - have convinced me that Biblical predictions of an all consuming conflagration centered in that volatile section of the world make more than a bit of sense. As far as I am concerned, they are all a bit balmy and all live lives of hysterical fanaticism filled with mindless racial and religious hatreds. I have a nagging fear that we will allow these maniacs to lead us all into and end times explosion that should never be.

What can we do about it? Not much. These people seem to be intent on self destruction and I am not always certain that we shouldn't just let them wipe each other out in a self consuming orgy of stupid hatred and insanity. The idiocy of the Egyptian, Jordanian, Syrian, Iraqi Palestinian and other Arabic government spokesmen claiming grand battle "victories" while getting their collective asses handed to them by the Israelis in 1967 and 1973 strikes me as idiocy raised to an art form.

I was reminded of that again tonight as I watched the so-called Minister of Public Information of Saddam's Iraq spew mindlessly idiotic statements to "press representatives' of the Arabic world that defy logic and reality and the realities of direct-from-the-battlefield-images on our television sets. What is truly troubling is that the Arabic "street" buys into that crap.

It's the same garbage we have heard from Iraq foreign minister Al Dhouri at the UN for several weeks now. Any rational being has to wonder what world these people have been living in.

The perfidy and treachery of the French

There is no excuse for the actions and words of the governments of Jacques Chirac or Gerhardt Shroeder of Germany over the past four months and more. I am compiling a list of products that are produced or sold by firms connected with France. I will vote my disgust with those members of the Axis of Weasels with my wallet henceforth. It is no accident that France was once called Gaul... especially when you consider the collosol gall they have exhibited now that the Butcher of Baghdad's Iraq is on its last legs. They want to control the rebuilding of a post-war Iraq and will veto any plan that would have the people who were willing to pay the pay the price of freedom for the people of Iraq oversee the process.

The United States Military

I must admit to a certain cynicism when it comes to our military... at least its upper levels. I have nothing buyt respect for the average fighting man or woman. I know firsthand how the top brass can, and do, warp and twist logic and rational thought. They coverup screwups and obuscate often. It is endemic to those who make it a profession, I fear. Despite all that, I have to say that I have the utmost respect for our all volunteer military, for the most part. Our military men and women are among the finest, best trained and most professional in history. Most serve with pride, dignity and a sense of honor that is often lacking in our general population.

I am also enraged by a few of them. I cannot stomach those scheming, valueless scum who complain that they have been called to active duty or assigned combat duties. Every time I hear some ass whimpering that he or she joined the military to "get an education, not fight a war," I want to bitch slap the idiot. Just what the Hell do they think the main purpose of the military is? Soldiers fight wars! Thanks to eight years of an administration that treated the military as a social engineering experimental laboratory and nearly fifty years of a failed public education system, we have entire generations of young people and adults who cannot, or choose not appreciate the obligations that go with the freedoms our citizenship - most often an accident of birth only. No freedom is ever without price. How dare they whine that they are being called upon to pay for that "free education?"

Is war ever the answer to disputes?

As I exlained to Draggie elsewhere on this page and have often said here and elsewhere, the predators among us determine the rules of engagement... not the normal, everyday man or woman. Predators, such as the likes of Saddam Hussein and his cronies, force us to speak the only language they truly understand - brutal force. When we are forced to revert to armed conflict by their criminal acts againstr our peace, we MUST respond with a level of force that leaves them, and those who would be like them, with no doubt that they made bad choices and will be called upon to pay the price for those choices.

The personal price of combat.

I have been told often by those who have no concept of the true price of living in peace that "You military types love war. It's all you understand. Only someone who has never lived through the terror and stomach-churning obscenity of combat could ever make such a statement. Peace at the price of appeasement is NOT peace at all. It is simple appeasement and the first step on the road to self imposed slavery. Most of the young people and even older ones who march and protest against our defense of our own safety and right to live in real peace have no understanding or appreciation of the sacrifices that those who have gone before us paid to assure them the very freedoms they so mindlessly abuse and betray. They give away with their own mindless positions when they commit acts of senseless violence to protest our nation's use of our legitimate military might to protect our citizens from more September 11th maniacs down the road. Self defense is not the same as bullying. It is a well recognized right of all men when confronted by those who would deny us those freedoms or the peace the protestors claim to uphold. They do not support "peace" at all. They support a mindless hatred of values they know themselves to be unable to live up to... moral codes of honor and dignity that are alien to their sliding scale moralities.

There is a horror that I pray no other man will ever have to confront. It comes when you must take the life of another - robbing him and his family of all their hopes and dreams. The mind-melting grief of watching someone you know die horribly before your eyes or in your arms should be the most alien of conditions for mankind, but each generation must confront its own such insanities. It is a price we pay for our freedom and it is a high price indeed. Once you have bought membership in that exclusive fraternity of combat veterans, you can never again be the same. The experience changes a man forever and steals away peaceful nights far into the years of his future. It takes away the ability to live without wondering - in quiet moments of soul rending agony that no other can really understand - "Why me? Why did I live and they didn't?"

The answer to that question is as painful as the question itself and equally impossible to accept rationally.

Who knows? There really isn't any answer and that is a devastating truth to confront every day for the remainder of your life.

Thank you folks for reading this. I have no idea if it makes any sense to anyone else or if it is supposed to. All I know is that I felt I needed to write these things and let you folks share these private thoughts. It is for examination and sharing of such life-defining thoughts that one has friends such as you folks.

If there really is some omniscient and omnipresent deity, perhaps it is His (or Her) way of saying to a private soldier, a common man who lays no claim to the title of "hero" and now grown older and still tortured by these memories and thoughts, "There are no answers that make sense, but be at peace anyway. You have earned it.

"

Damn! I hope so.