My answer may actually shock some, but it is how I feel. It has taken me many years to come to formlate these positions. They are still taking form even now, as I write this and they will probably continue to evolve for whatever time I have left on this plane.

Your question appears simple enough on its face, but I see in it a truly deep and meaningful quest for the thoughts of one who lived through that atrocity. I shall attempt to give you the honest answers you deserve. For, you see, there is more than one answer to each of your questions.

Does an American citizen have a right to question his government and to protest its actions when he or she feels they are wrong? You bet your young behind they do and I was willing to die so that they could always have those rights. I am infuriated with those who claim that anyone who rationally and reasonably questions is a traitor just for questioning. Were it not for people questioning government and demanding redress of wrongs, this nation would not even exist.

That said, I have a special loathing in my soul for draft dodgers and America-haters who have no problem with lapping up all the freedoms they wish to deny to anyone else who disputes their views. The cowardly draft dodgers are less than human garbage who should not pollute the planet by breathing the same air as those who did their duty and met their obligations as citizens as far as I am concerned. Every draft dodger meant that someone else's son, brother, sweetheart, husband, father or friend was placed in danger of dying... and many of those who went in their places did just that, or came back missing major body parts or functions. There is no way of knowing exactly how many of the acknowledged 58,300+ young men and women who died in southeast Asia died because they were there to replace one of those self-centered, spineless, lacking-in-moral-values-and-personal-integrity cowards who wished to enjoy all the benefits of U. S. citizenship but ran like the scurrilous rats they were - AND STILL ARE - when the bill on those freedoms came due. I consider the traitorous actions of James Earle Carter to welcome those slimy b*stards back without cost to be an unforgivable insult to every man and woman who served and the most vile of insults to every one of our young men and women who died doing their duty as citizens.

Bubba the Slut was, and is, another affront to every good and decent man and woman who served or stayed in this country and took his chances with the draft. He professed his disdain and dislike (loathing, as he put it) of all things military long ago and did nothing in his miserable life to ever overcome that failing as a human being... if we choose to stretch the definition of "human being" enough to include him. I don't.

It is one thing to protest. It is something entirely different to be an America-hater and that, my friend is what most, if not all, of the publicly touted "peace demonstrators" really are. They are not against "war." They are against America and everything it stands for. Peace at any price is not peace. It is appeasement and the sure and certain road to slavery.

I have no patience with such fools. I used to say in the preamble to this forum that I support "freedom of speech" but that no one should ever confuse "freedom of speech" with license. The mindless rabble who prance around carrying "hate America" signs do not support peace or freedom of any speech except the speech that they support. They support the overthrow of our system of government and the destruction of our economic system because they hold an arrogant, misplaced and misguided belief that they know better how we should live our lives than we do. Why don't those same people hold as much disdain for the atrocities common to the regimes of Saddam Hussein, Kim Jung Il or Hassan of Syria? They have to be forced to admit that Hussein is a murderous despot and tyrant and they almost choke on the admissions. I love to see the discomfort on their faces when they are confronted by an honest reporter who challenges them on this basic reality. Some still refuse to admit it, even then.

Do our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms include such seditious and treasonous speech by such human vermin as these? Not to my way of thinking. They have gone beyond "dissent" and "protest." They have stepped over the boundaries of decency and reasoned disagreement and are too warped to even recognize it. Let me give you some examples that may help you understand my point of view.

To me, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are clownish buffoons who do black Americans a disservice. Even so, I support their right to say what they think and believe and I would willingly fight anyone who tried to silence their right to make their idiotic statements. As a matter of fact, the best ammunition against such idiocy is to let the idiots speak freely and publicly. They do their purported causes more damage than anyone else could ever do. But, just as a blind squirrel can often find an acorn, they too can say some things that are truly worth consideration from time to time. We would lose even those few rare pearls of worthwhile concepts if we were to attempt to close off the oyster heaps of their mouths and silence their foolish pronouncements.

Another man I must give respect, though I am in total disagreement with his position, is Mohammed Ali - the former Cassius Clay. I am in no way capable of passing judgement on the veracity of his purported converson to Islam. I did recognize a con job when I saw and heard it back then, but events since then make me think he may have actually started to believe his own words. NONETEHLESS, he was willing to stay here and face prison rather than betray his stated beliefs. THAT TOO IS AN ACT OF AMERICAN FREEDOM IN MY BOOK! I respect him for that. He did not feed on the teat of American plenty and then run like a cockroach when exposed to the light of public scrutiny or a possible need to pay the price of those freedoms. He did not run for another country like those cowards such as Bubba did. He stood tall and proud in his beliefs and I salute him for having the courage of his convictions. I listened carefully, even then, to what he had to say in opposition to the war we fought. I did not agree with many and most of his conclusions, but I did celebrate his right to have them, however misguided I thought they might be.

I had an opportunity to meet and get to know Hosea Williams while he was alive. He and I did not see eye to eye on many things, but there were areas in which we shared common commitments. I would have gladly stepped in front of a rock or bottle or beer can meant for him and thrown by some toothless, equally mindless hater of men because of something over which none of us, or them, have any control.

I hold many views that some might wrongly call "racist" because they go against the grain of "politically correct thinking." Those who call me that would be totally wrong, for a "racist" is one who thinks ANY race is superior to ANY OTHER race. I don't give ANY race that kind of credit. We're all living in this world together and our best, and only, chance of meaningful survival is to try to work together. The only race or breed of man I hate instinctively is a mindless hater... of any color, creed, national origin, sexual orientation or political belief. He who hates because of political affiliation alone is as bad as the Klan Klad Klutz screaming about "them N*****" in my book.

Should we have been in southeast Asia to begin with? I am the wrong one to ask that question. Yes, there were times I was part of an operation that may have wrongly killed innocent villagers who allowed the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars to use their hootches as storage depots for weapons and hiding places for people who killed friends of mine. I did not ever knowingly kill an innocent civilian, but there is no sanity or order in the chaos of battle. Who knows? Such questions trouble my dreams to this day.

Perhaps a real life story from my own life can help you come to the answer I found for myself many years back.

It was one of those days so common to that monsoon-drenched hellhole of madness, murder an mayhem. We had been on a LRRP ("Lurp" or Long Range Reconnaisance Patrol) and were on our way back to our firebase. Some mindless REMF twit with too much starch in his military underwear and no brains under his military headcover had decided that our unit had too much "blade time" (use of helicopters) racked up and we would have to walk all the way back to base. As we came upon a "vill" of Hmong people in the mountainous area outside our AO (Area of Operations), we encountered an enemy force killing almost all of the men of the village and conscripting the young boys and men into their forces at gunpoint.

Those "glorious freedom fighters" as Hanoi Jane stupidly and criminally called them had slaughtered over 60% of the people in that village when we got there. We were short on ammo, food, water, supplies and out of range of any of our "assets" (artillery and air support). We were exhausted and could have stayed silent and unseen... just bypassing the "problem" for those villagers. No one would have blamed us.

I cannot relate to you just how proud I am now, and was then, that we all attacked without a moment's hesitation. I did not have to "order" a single man to act. We did it because we are Americans and that's how young American fighting men are, for the most part. We will defeat your nation's leadership, but we will feed, clothe and treat your people who suffer.

Until that point, we had been extremely lucky. Not one of our guys had been wounded or killed on the LURP... a highly unusal situation. That changed in a hurry. I soon had two more of those damned "letters home" to write that night and three of the guys qualified for yet another Purple Heart "pineapple" to mark the fact that they had already received several others previously. The fight was vicious and a real drain on already exhausted young fighting men, but it was a fight we knew we had to wage. At that moment, there was no "corrupt" regime in the South nor any gang of communist-dictators-in-the-making in the North that meant anything to any of us or to those people in that "vill." They just wished to live freely and unafraid. We helped them achieve that, at least for a time, on that steamy, exhausting and blood-drenched afternoon. It was one of many such actions I saw while I was there. It took place in late 1968.

In the mid-1980s, I was living in a suburb of New Orleans when we got new neighbors. I saw them moving in and thought little of it. I did notice that they appeared to be Asian, but made no connections between the new neighbors and anything that had gone before in my life. Suddenly the man of the household spotted me. He dropped the things he had been carrying and began excitedly screaming something in the language of the Hmong. He ran to throw his arms around me and collapsed into a heap with his arms wrapped tightly around my waist, sobbing uncontrollably. I had absolutely no idea what was happening or why, when the elderly man and woman who were also obviously a part of the household spotted me and did encore performances of what the man had done. Then the woman of the house dragged her two children to the pile of humanity draped on me, sobbing and weeping, and began saying something to them in that same sing song language I remembered far too well - pointing excitedly at me. All I could understand was the oriental pronounciation of a name I had long ago shed, or thought I had --- "L-t" --- the name commonly applied by all American servicemen to a Second Lieutenant in any Army or Marine unit. It was the only name I had for almost two full years.

After the initial confusion had subsided, I learned that they had been residents of that village whose name I still don't really remember. The "mother and father" were about to be executed when we interferred in that North Vietnamese slaughter. The boy had already been tied with other village boys of his age and was being marched off to forced service as a "freeedom fighter" when we struck. He managed to escape, though he was wounded. After the firefight, we treated him and others in his village who had been wounded. The "wife" was his childhood friend from that village whom he later married. The entire family managed to escape from Viet Nam after the useless South Vietnamese Army (Marvin the ARVN) gave up the nation to the harsh heel of communist tyranny when we pulled out.

It took them many years and a great deal of sacrifice, but the entire family crossed an entire world and eventually made their way to the United States. Once here, the young man and his new wife both enrolled in school, mastered English and eventually both became dentists. They had provided a home for his mother and father while they accomplished all of that and had two beautiful children in the process. Now they had graduated from all the past hardships to a new home in my neighborhood. Somehow, they immediately recognized me, though I didn't think I any longer resembled that unwashed, unshaved creature of that time long away and far ago.

From that day forward, I had a real, if somewhat confounding problem. I would go to mow my lawn, only to discover that they had already done it and the entire family was out there on hands and knees, with scissors in hand, trimming and edging. I would go to bring in the garbage can after the garbage collectors had passed only to discover they had already brought it back to where I normally kept it. I had to be waiting for the garbage collectors to empty it if I wished to do this chore for myself.

It took a lot of persuasion on my part to finally convince them that they did not owe me such treatment and that it was not only unnecessary, it was somewhat embarassing. I think it even hurt their feelings a bit that I felt that way, but I have never had better neighbors in my life.

Should we have been in southeast Asia in the first place? I guess it depends on who you ask. I know that I discovered in the 1980s, almost 15 years after I got back, that I was glad I had been there that day. I have a feeling that family would have a positive answer to your question as well. While I was immersed in that cesspool of existence, I took part in horrific acts of carnage and mayhem, memories of which will continue to shatter every dream on every night I live for the remainder of my life, but there were other moments that helped me understand. The stupidity of diplomats, functionaries and military men who were intent on trying to refight teh wide open pasture land battles of World War II in a jungle covered, rice paddy strewn, straight up and down hell hole against an enemy who would have been good Apache warriors in the old west of this nation made it an insanity barely comprehensible then, or now.

However, I will tell you of the smile on the face of a three year old orphan girl who was missing a leg thanks to the wonderful misitrations of the brave "freedom fighters" who were the heroes of the mislead, misquided, knowingly misinformed "peace protestors" of that day and time. There were no reasons for her to smile in that world of insanity but she did smile anyway. That smile became a gift from an angel to my heart when I gave her the doll I picked up for her on my last visit to the PX at Chu Lai. Her smiles answered your question for me then and they still do when I have a chance to remember those times instead of the others I would rather never remember. For whatever reasons we did go there, rightly or wrongly, such events made it right and just for us to have been there.

I hope I have answered your question for you and I thank you for asking. I needed to remember that little girl tonight. Who knows? I might even get a good night's sleep for a change.