Joe Colgan is a friend of mine and one who is writes from a place of knowing and feeling. He does not speak theoretically nor rant as Mr. Steff just did. Colgan is not alone.

What Joe Colgan has written has little to do with the Republican swagger, prance, and posture as the world-wide tough guy whom everyone owes obeisance and fear-driven respect. Such is not the American Core Value nor American Dream nor true American Patriotism.

Who has earned the right to speak about serious stuff with a veterans's wisdom? One group are those of my generation who've been there and done that. Twenty pages of rants from readers like Mr. Steff account for very little when contrasted with speaking from the knowing of experience and the wisdom of Veteran American heroes like Jack Murtha.

Our sons and daughters in the military serve honorably, deserve our highest respect and devotion. It should be recognized that the following are the conditions under which Americans expect their family blood to serve:

(1) The integrity and honor of the commander in chief of the military and that CIC's skill, wisdom and understanding of all reasons when and why military citizens are to be placed in harm's way.

Troops are at the mercy of that individual, his party and their combined priorities - with a strong expectation that those priorities extend beyond a desire to remain in the driver's seat.

(2)Our troops are also at the mercy of your own fellow citizens (including your own family) whom you trust to be willing and supportive in making sure the leadership does not waste your vital blood, devotion and patriotism in pipe dreams, self-interested agenda's and ideologies; That leaders are driven by a genuine desire to involve the country in on-going mutual participation and compromise regarding foreign policy before resorting to force as a last resort.

(3) Volunteering to become a soldier is volunteering to preserve and protect - with your own power and will - the country, its borders, its citizens and its institutions. It isn't volunteering to keep a political party in power. The only way to avoid that circumstance is for the citizens to assume their rightful role in the triangular relationship with the troops and the CIC.

The troops are expected to trust the CIC's wisdom as well as the patriotic participation of the Citizens who will keep the CIC honest.

The CIC is expected to trust the troops to follow orders and expects to sustain by honesty and integrity the support of the Citizens.

The Citizens expect the troops to do their duties and expect the CIC to sustain by honesty and integrity his political authority. The Citizens must be willing to hold the CIC accountable and willfully resist when the honesty and integrity of leadership is absent.

That is what is going on right now. The President has demonstrated his lack of what it means to serve or lead warriorsat a time when leadership is needed. The killing continues daily and folks like Steff talking like John Wayne in a junior high school locker room doesn't get it.

(1)
We must fight the war on terror while remaining strictly stuck with the Republican Tax Cut Experiment which has not helped Mr. Bush avoid being a president who not only did not create one new job in 4 years, but will have a net job loss in excess of several million. We are then left to hope for the best but continue to expect the worst and that middle class taxes are going to continue paying for our prosecution of the war on terror.

(2)
We will prosecute the war on terror in a pay-off-the-national-debt circumstance created by this administration that will be an ongoing burden on our grandchildren. Trillions of dollars of debt generated by a Republican party that has always labeled Democrats as taxers and spenders is not something Leno and Maher can make jokes about.

(3)
We will prosecute the war on terror while Mr. Bush and gang are baiting us with the phrase "ownership society" which in reality is a switch to another means of generating - you guessed it - more profits for business. "Owning" health care, retirement, education and hours of wage-earning only happens when you "buy" something or "invest" in something to own.

(4)
We will prosecute the war on terror while an ungodly number of us go without access to adequate health care. That's one thing tens of millions of Americans could use ownership of.

Of course the rest of we middle classers do "own" always-increasing health care premiums. Somehow I fail to see how this helps the troops, keeps terrorists at bay, or will make it easier when we invade Iran in order to secure whatever the neocons think needs securing.

(5)
We will prosecute the war on terror in a context of profits for HMO's and Pharmaceuticals at the expense of fixed income retiree's and elderly citizens who may not live to see the victory that Mr. Bush said we wouldn't have and then flip-flopped to say, "Oh yes we will."

That Medicare D legislation is the most abject legislative failure seen in this country in I don't know how many years.

Why?

Because it was dominated by narrow Republican economic theory and corporate priorities, that's why.

(6)
We will prosecute the war on terror while the Republicans - under the guise of "ownership society"- preside over corporate reductions and/or eliminations of pension funds. Why is it that we must be patriotic and support the current commander-in-chief under this circumstance?

(7)
We will prosecute the war on terror while Bush postures as some kind of "education President" who, despite the compassionate self-label, has left children behind, imposed terrible burdens on public schools, and failed to provide the necessaries to make his compassionate promises come true.

(8)
We will prosecute the war on terror while George Bush, who pretends to BE the Christian Right, works hand in glove with the Christian Zionists to encourage Israel to widen it's borders in order to look like the Israel of prophesy so Jesus and his Armageddon Asteroid can End the Times and leave all of us more liberal-minded Christians Left Behind.

(9)
We will prosecute the war on terror with the neocon foreign policy dingbats fully embedded in the governance of every what-to-do next.

Our "war on terror" will camouflage an absolute conviction on the part of failed foreign policy theorists that American might is the brave new world of the future - that American might will facilitate our continued consumption of an inordinate share of energy reserves.

Why?

Because we can, that's why.

(10)
Under the neocons, we will prosecute an ongoing string of military adventures that will continue to cost the precious blood of our children based on intellectual immaturity in which necons ignorantly and naively assume that the poor and middle class of this country constitute a willing and unlimited supply of military manpower for decades to come.

These things are what the Republicans did not and will not tell you. They want to prosecute the war on terrorism and do it in terms of maintaining their own discredited and - when it comes to corporate welfare - dishonest domestic economic theories.

It does not matter what you and I think so long as they are in power.

Only you and I can take this out of their hands. They are not going to maintain the current foreign policy while changing economic approaches.

They want both to remain unchanged.

They will not change things unless we intervene.

So all you self-styled economic sophisticates who have bought into Republican capitalism worship and cannot see that many corporations in this country are only showing profits primarily through government intervention and bail-outs - you go ahead and reveal just how poorly you understand the less-government-more-free-enterprise ticket.

Grover Norquist may someday buy you a latte from Starbucks after the government becomes so small it goes down the bathtub drain.

Of course you may be standing behind the Starbucks counter brewing and serving the latte yourself.

Grover won't mind. He's smarter than you in a really dumb way.

So all you righteous Christians who see George Bush as led by God to export war and death to all evil-doers as we impose a neocon Pax Americana on the world go ahead and look the other way while your narrow morality authorizes a trashing of the American Dream.

Just don't tell me that Jesus would vote the same way, would advocate for George Bush on FOX , Limbaugh's program - even the 700 Club - and would go along with the deaths of civilian men, women and children in Iraq or anywhere else as "acceptable collateral damage."

You still haven't done your homework and the holes in your civic wisdom remain vast and empty.

I wasn't about to drive over and see that. I was too mad at Jane Fonda - mad about her movie Barbarella which had offended my youthful moral view of the world. And I was incensed by her Hanoi affair.

I don't remember hearing anything about John Kerry back then and his post-Viet Nam role against the war. I recently watched a Dick Cavett show where Kerry debated another vet and can assure you that at that time I would have voted Kerry into the brig for what he was saying and doing.

Funny how time changes perspectives.

My yuppie kids are outraged that in 1969 I willfully  refused to go to Woodstock.

I agree with them.

What was I thinking?

Was my patriotism so shallow that rain, mud, outlandish music, naked women and pot smoke could rock my foundation as a true American?

I'm embarrassed about what I thought was important when I was 22 and what I did and didn't do about it.

Yet, here I am today, a middle-aged repository of all my experience which is the only source of wisdom I have to offer my kids and grandkids.

I sure as heck am not going to teach my kids that military veterans are long on judgment and condemnation and short on wisdom.

No, I'm not retired from the military. I got out after 6 years and later served 2 more in the reserve.

30 years later, I'm still aware of a sense of difference between the civilian and military world where you have got to trust somebody before you follow them.

In 1968 I was so mad at LBJ, I voted for Nixon so I guess that made me a Republican.

In 72 I thought McGovern was a peacenik and I was a war-nik so I gave RMN another vote.

In 76 I was genuinely offended at Nixon - and Ford for pardoning him - so I voted for Carter.

In 1980 when Reagan asked "Are you better off now...." he got my vote.

In 1984 he looked tougher than Mondale so I voted for RR again.

By 1988 though, I didn't trust Bush the First so I went into my vote-for-the-outsider mode and voted for Dukakis.

1992 and I'm mad at Bush Sr. who seemed to think looking like Patton would fix the economy and voted for Bill with the following little sentence in sotto voce: "Ok you SOB, you'd better not blow it."

By 1996 I began to suspect I was more of a liberal than a conservative and just couldn't bring myself to vote for Dole.

So there I am, trying to vote the man instead of the party, flip-flopping and waffling with the best of them.

By 2000 I realized that my veteran's instincts were alive and well and I saw only form without substance in Dubya. Besides, an old NBA fan like me thought Bill Bradley was the smartest guy for president and I was disappointed that he didn't get nominated.

I voted for Gore, the veteran.

So let's get real out there! Being so offended at what Kerry said and did in 1971 that you voted for George more out of spite than wisdom is not a prideful attribute.

If you think there is more international wisdom and military craftsmanship from a gang that truly cannot shoot straight, has not shot straight and  literally did not serve - has not been there nor done that - then by all means betray what you think you stand for.

Speak out and reveal your belief that splashing around in shallow water is better than learning to swim and navigate in something deeper where there's much more substance to everything.

Go ahead and pretend that Repuglican political fools - presenting to us a bushwhacking war president who is bluffing - have really convinced you that Bush knows more about the military than Jack Murtha;

That Mr. Bush as a run-and-hide Texas Champaign Guardsman is truly a wiser military-veteran grown-up than Jack Murtha;

Be sure to watch a lot of Fox TV (chicken hawk heaven) and pay attention when William Kristol of PNAC fame makes a guest appearance there and talks like winning games of RISK make him a strategic wunderkind;

who said last year that Ted Koppel shouldn't have said out loud on Nightline the names of our fellow warriors who didn't make it.

And by all means, go to Kristol's pride and joy site  The Project for the New American Century.

There you'll find an ivory-looking tower made of fragile glass full of intellectual hubris. It's a place where political power theories look like they came out of a perusal of Cliff Notes and where - like in RISK - military troops are nothing more than little colored blocks of wood that are casually swept off the board with each roll of the dice.

That's the alternative to using your own common sense.

Jack Murtha is much closer to the reality in which I live and the memory trove from where my own supposed wisdom comes.

I trust Jack.

Exerpts

I joined the Army a month before Sept. 11th to get out of the dead end rut I managed into back in Colorado.

My father was a Vietnam Vet who, after retiring from 20 long years as an engineer, died from cancer that was cause by Agent Orange exposure in Nam. Joining the service is something I vowed never to do. But, I was a high school drop out going into his mid twenties and I started to panic that the doorway of opportunities was snapping shut.

...I was deployed in Kosovo when the war kicked off in Iraq. Actually I was on leave from Kosovo headed home for two weeks of R&R. I was on lay over at Dallas/Ft.Worth airport as Bush's 48 hour threat for Saddam's surrender ran out and Bradleys started crossing the line.

As I watched Baghdad exploding on TV the people all around me were on their feet cheering like the Cowboys just won the super bowl.

I sunk in my chair. I wished I could rip my BDUs off. I felt sick.

I had a gut feeling things were a bit foul. And, as the war continued on during those two weeks, I gathered a good deal of literature on the subject of war and peace and the middle-east. I filled a duffel bag full of books and when I returned to Kosovo I began to educate myself on American policy and why other countries might hate us.

I started to see America from the outside in. Have you ever seen a home movie of yourself and realized how ridiculous you acted, looked or sounded? That was my new perception of America. I was embarrassed and humbled. But, I also realized that I was what I was. I had a responsibility to change what I could.

...The writings helped in many ways.

First it was a coping mechanism to deal with the rage and emotions I felt about the war. It just felt good to rant.

Second it provided me a way that I felt my taking part in the war could be justified.

Like, if I was a witness for many people in the real world than there was one good reason to be there.

Third it gave me a connection to the outside world and that was what may have kept me sane in the end.

Few of us are in a position to know precisely what would happen could a survey be taken among the troops with an expectation of honest and open responses as to true feelings about Iraq.

A significant portion of our military citizens are - almost by definition - what I would call in a respectful way "institutional patriots" whose duty is in many ways a formalized and constant version of what the rest of us would do only if enemy boots hit the ground in the United States.  

You can hear, in their proud recitations of the good things being done in Iraq and individual relationships between Iraquis and themselves, the pride of ownership of their own American citizenship.

Yet citizen opinion within the enlisted ranks remains highly varied. Although the risk of suppression, ostracism, alienation or out and out retribution is there for speaking out against the President and/or the government, there are those soldiers whose courage not only helps drive their Humvee's but their voices as well.