Perhaps now resigned to the verity that time waits for no one, recipients get together as often as possible, but forty years ago, when men now long g… - Jack H. Jacobs

Today, a small number of brave and dedicated young Americans have answered the call, and whatever else one can argue about the merits of recent uses of military power, it is impossible not to revere the patriotism of these volunteers. More Americans were killed in New York on September 11, 2001, than were lost on December 7, 1941, and yet the response was a small fraction of that after Pearl Harbor. What is interesting, and more than a little distressing, is that the number of people wearing the uniform is only a bit more than 1.5 million on active duty, and that this represents only one-half of one percent of Americans.
One may reasonably inquire why, if the war in Iraq is so unpopular, there aren't riots in the streets as there were during the war in Vietnam. One answer is that our service members are all volunteers, and no one else has to serve. This country has been going about its business almost as if nothing catastrophic has occurred, while the sacrifice has come from only a few citizens. Those of us who don't serve have thus outsourced our defense to those who do. One could argue persuasively that if all citizens had a stake in the protection of our freedom, the arbitrary use of the military instrument of power, as a first resort, would be very difficult to engineer.

It's sort of like the guy said, Justice Potter Stewart, when presented with the opportunity to rule on whether something was obscene or not, he said, I don't have to tell you what it is; I'll know it when I see it. And I think it's a lot like that in combat. If you were to ask somebody before he went in, 'Are you going to be able to acquit yourself honorably?' he'll say, 'Yes'- without knowing what that circumstance will be.

Young people don't have enough peripheral vision, they can't see very far into the future. Toward the end of my college career, the war was starting to heat up and a lot of people were against it already, but I figured they probably didn't know what they were talking about. There were no big protests at Rutgers, but the tenor of the intellectual discourse was decidedly against American participation in the war. Later on, I had a fairly grown-up view of what the war was really like and that the chances of getting your head blown off as an adviser were just as good as anywhere else: It's all a matter of luck, most times, anyway, all things being equal. So it's irrelevant whether you're standing in a bar that gets mortared or lying in the middle of a rice paddy getting shot at.