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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (1517)	4/4/1999 6:20:00 PM
From: Impristine	Respond to of 17770

prove to be tougher, than who, the IRS, can we declare war, on the IRS, we don't need em, we don't need no stinkin, IRS, those dudes, can't they be paperless, can't we make this a paperless war, a real war is so messy, it would help if it was, a paperless war, would save all the papercuts, lets have a paper war, fire all the IRS freedom fighters, it would help, everyone would be better off, and no one, would be worse off.... Photo of IRS Freedom Fighter: donandmikeshow.com

To: George Papadopoulos who wrote (1517)	4/4/1999 9:29:00 PM
From: nuke44	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 17770

I always remember something that I was told during my first tour of duty in Southeast Asia. I was stationed at Ne Kam Phenom, Thailand and had made friends with a Thai Military Policeman. One day he confided to me that Americans scared the hell out of him. I asked him why. He said that we were "The smiling killers". He said Americans could be smiling and joking one second, coldhearted killers the next, and be smiling and joking again before the dead body hit the floor. Being a wet-behind-the-ears 19 year old, I took offense to what I considered an insult to Americans. He assured me that it wasn't. I decided to let him live. ( joke ) He held Americans in the same type of exalted awe/fear that many Asians reserved for the insane, interpreting that insanity as being "touched by the gods". As the years went by, his words stayed with me. Time and again, I compared his analogy of the smiling killer to events going on around me and saw that he may have been right. So George, don't read too much into the anecdote from your brother. That same GI that claimed that it was just a "phucking job" could very well believe it and see no conflict between that and then killing everything in his sights if he believed they were the "enemy". History backs this up. In our own modest little civil war (Called the War of Northern Aggression in the lexicon of my hometown) we killed almost 700,000 of each other in a four year period. That's just soldiers, not "collateral deaths" of civilians. In a career covering three decades, I can say definitively, if not proudly, that the US Soldier is one of the deadliest incarnations of homo sapien to ever walk the earth and statistics will back that up. He is well trained, and possesses a sub-conscious motivation that he may not even be aware of. Sometimes the dichotomy of the "smiling killer" scared me and I was one of the anointed few. It's hard to explain, but every American has been imbued with a sense of "manifest destiny" since the cradle, along with a healthy nationalistic ego. Trust me on this. I wouldn't want to be facing an American soldier who "knows" he is fighting on the right side. I believe that since becoming a world power shortly after the turn of the century, on the whole the US has chosen it's fights wisely and with justification. Not always, but anti-US propaganda to the contrary, we don't use our military might in wars of territorial expansion, unlike Serbia's Slavic brethren to the east. We do it because we believe we're right. I hope we're right this time.