So we don't have to fight them here

That is a much more telling line than you might imagine. Any time someone says that, rest assured that this is not a peace-loving person. Americans are not peace-loving people. We just don't want the fighting going on here where it would interrupt our ability to consume and watch cable TV.

We are a blood-thirsty people with an insatiable appetite for more and newer amusements. A favorite "sport" among our men is hunting. (How many pheasants and mallards did Cheney kill? He's going to eat them all, I suppose. It wasn't just for the sport.) Our favorite entertainment, for both men and women, is violent sport and TV shows like Jerry Springer and Cops. We are eager to send soldiers to any country that gets in the way of our commercial pursuits or dares to challenge our might and "superiority".

We are incredible hypocrites in denial when we say we want peace on earth.

What got me started on this post is an article about soldiers who are recounting the atrocities they committed in Viet Nam, and then I went off on a tangent, my trademark.

It's interesting to me that these articles are coming out now. It's almost as though for thirty years these guys kept quiet - or maybe they just didn't have a ready outlet because no news source was interested in publishing this kind of information. And now, with the very similar approach to warring in Iraq, these men are being given the opportunity to tell their stories. What is interesting about that is those who seem to feel that what they did was justifiable as it was done in the setting of war and under great duress.

"Can you imagine Dodge City without a sheriff?" Mr. Kerney asked. "It's just nuts. You never had a safe zone. It's shoot too quick or get shot. You're scared all the time, you're humping all the time. You're scared. These things happen."

Mr. Doyle said he lost count of the people he killed: "You had to have a strong will to survive. I wanted to live at all costs. That was my primary thing, and I developed it to an instinct."

I will grant that being in war creates situations that make people behave in extreme ways, which is another argument against war. It doesn't justify anything.

Another thing these men who are being interviewed want you to know is that they were under orders to do what they did. I have heard from a special forces friend that this is true. That friend cannot find enough ways to absolve himself of the guilt. But "just following orders" works for some, I guess.

"For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public," the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.

"Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers," The [Toledo] Blade said. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed - their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings."

That, I think was not done in the heat of the moment, frightened for your life. And I will also grant that it is quite likely a person would be so mentally changed from their fighting experiences that they simply became something less than human. Another argument against war.

However, what's disturbing about the war in Iraq is that news reports of similar atrocities do get into the press, but not widely circulated. And I have the terrible sinking feeling that Americans would not react all that negatively. We would find the actions justifiable. We even came up with a nice name for it: collateral damage.

American troops in Vietnam, he said, had "raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of SouthVietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

What American Viet Nam soldier testified thusly to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971?

Senator John Kerry.

No, it's not terrorists that scare me. It's my fellow Americans. There are so many more of them. And they are the ones who kill for the thrill.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.