[Gay State Conservative]

I have found myself believing that this battle and others like it deprived our gene pool of the quality of selfless courage, leaving us with only the successors of the 4Fs who stayed home.

My Dad was an "essential civilian employee"...essential because he worked for a company that designed and built missiles for the Navy.Guys trained to fire the missiles are useless without missiles to fire.My Dad's older brother lost an eye in a playground accident when he was a kid.He very much wanted to fight and tried to enlist.His efforts failed miserably.

[Chainmail]

That's what I get for generalizing. I stand corrected and I apologize to people like your Dad and your Brother. We could not have won anything without the talents and services of our designers and manufacturers and I have a younger Brother who couldn't serve in Vietnam because of injuries he got riding my motorcycle.

My bitterness and fallacious Darwinistic theories stemmed from returning from combat in Vietnam to see thousands of able-bodied young men enjoying the '60s as though there wasn't anything happening elsewhere. I resented it ferociously and even confronted an entire football team at my college because they were wearing antiwar protest regalia. I was probably lucky they didn't want to fight. I told them that we could've used big guys like them at least to carry ammo boxes but it seemed that it was only the shorter, skinny guys with glasses who were carrying the load for our country.

I haven't lost a bit of that resentment against people like Cheney who got three draft deferments because he "had better things to do". He missed his chance to learn what it was like to be surrounded by some of the best young men that he'd ever meet who were will to lose everything they had for their country.