Volunteers, not Victims!

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Why are so many Americans so eager to try to paint our troops as nothing but a bunch of victims of the evil George Bush? There are only about 10 servicemembers in the US Military today who were drafted. The rest voluntarily joined up. Even those 10 became volunteers when they reenlisted. When I first joined the Utah National Guard, and later went Active Duty Army, it was pretty safe to assume that you wouldn't go to war. Vietnam had been over for 11 years. The Cold War was still going, but unless you were stationed Europe it wasn't going to involve you much. Even the drill sergeant and training NCOs referred to war in the abstract. "If the balloon goes up", "Whenever the next war happens"... Unless you were in Special Ops, it was all "if" or "whenever"... Then the balloon went up... We stared calling them "Christmas Parties" because in the late 80s they got us wondering where we were going to be for Christmas. Panama, St. Croix, The Philipines, Liberia. Then Desert Shield/Storm in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq (I spent that Christmas playing volleyball on the beach of the Persian Gulf). Then it was down to Florida for Hurricane Andrew, Somalia... etc... If we didn't have our rucks packed for in country ops, we had them ready for support ops. If it wasn't a brushfire or war, it was for a humanitarian mission here in the US or somewhere else. Nobody today can say that they didn't know that joining up meant they could go to war. Ok so they signed up knowing, but then when they got there, they learned they were duped... Well, yeah, some did. Some were even stuck because of Stop Loss (which was never some government secret anyway). However, if you look at what's going on now, the units with the highest reenlistment are the ones that have been in country in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. The people who have been and seen the ugly are reenlisting KNOWING THEY WILL GO BACK. They believe in what they are doing over there, and so should we. So, next time you read some "news" item painting our troops as suckers, too naive to move, laugh in the incompetent "reporter's" face. Next time some self-promoting politician says that our troops are "stuk in Irak", vote the real sucker out. I'm not going to say that all our troops are there because they want to be. I'm not even going to say that those who reenlisted wouldn't rather be home with their families and friends. What I am saying is that they are Volunteers not Victims. If you have to make someone a victim in order to respect them, well, I question your idea of "respect" in the first place.