Uncle Sam Wants YOU. He Really Wants You...

I was going to start by saying that I can't imagine being 17 now, and facing a war wherein Americans were dying every day. I've seen a half century come and go, so it's been quite some time since I was that full of piss and vinegar.

But then, when I was 17 several dozen to hundreds young people every week were coming home from Viet Nam in flag-draped coffins (that were able to be photographed back then). So, while it's been a long time, I have deep in my memory that dull fear of the possibility that I might be sent to a distant place to die for something that no one could quite put their finger on.

There was very little fighting the good fight romance to the war back then, and the same can be said for now. In Iraq there's no specific person--an enemy whose troops have invaded other countries and must be turned back. We're the troops who have invaded a country, and a goodly percentage of the people there hate us and want us gone.

It's against that backdrop that the Army is having a hard time meeting its recruitment quota. With the US's unpredictable economy, and daunting outsourcing problems, many young people these days look around their respective home towns and see little of interest and few solid possibilities for the future. Military service seems like a viable possibility.

Ah, but then there's the Iraq war. I believe there's a collective sense that this was an elective war. And since they're the ones who pay the price, our volunteer military has every right to its doubts and its fears.

So a high school student in Colorado decided to do a little investigative journalism to see if his local recruiters would bend...or even break the rules to get him to sign up. The local news report on the matter is here and quite worth watching. Two separate recruiters urged him to lie, and even create a fake diploma to be accepted into the military.

This all hits a little closer to home though for me. Since my daughter has turned 16, she's gotten several items from the Army encouraging her to consider enlistment. As someone who's watched our president send more than 1500 Americans to their deaths for a war he can nowhere near justify to me, I'm angry that my child is being encouraged to consider the Army. Lord knows if Bush were of enlistment age, his privileged ass would see no combat.

The brave young men and women who volunteer to serve have every right to believe that their president will only send them to fight and die when all other possibilities have been exhausted. I feel horribly for those who believed that about this president because they were not only wrong, they were the ones who paid the ultimate price for his errors in judgment.