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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (192703)	6/30/2004 10:16:52 PM
From: SilentZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576926

Last night, I spent some time with a friend who's getting shipped to Iraq in September. I hadn't seen him in nearly a year, because he's been at various bases being told that he'd be shipped off within 30 days over and over. Now he's got a date to go. Well, I was intent on telling him last night that I didn't want him to go, but he's fully gung-ho about going -- for two reasons: he wants to get it over with already, and he feels that his men are the most prepared in the entire Army, so he feels reasonably safe. He's an officer, and he says that the first thing he tells all of his men about going to Iraq is, "You're all Nazis." Sounds really weird, no? He explained: No matter what good things they do for the Iraqis and no matter how noble their intentions are, the Iraqis will still see them as horrible occupiers (the Nazi reference). So, trust no one. Interesting. I asked him for whom he plans to vote in November, and he said "Whoever is running against Bush." He also said that once a member of the military reaches a certain level, he or she becomes a politician more than a soldier, and those people are mostly Republicans these days. However, he said that most of the low-level soldiers are now very much against the war -- as he said to me, he himself was not until he started seeing people he knew come home missing limbs or in coffins. He said that that process has hit the military in a very significant way. It was quite enlightening; that's not what I expected from him, even having seen F9/11. This kid has worshipped the flag as long as I've known him; he went to military school and as a freshman used to pick fights with upper classmen whom he felt were disrespecting their uniforms. Food for thought. -Z