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It was great as long as the benefits came with no sacrifice.

That's exactly what Mr. M and I were saying as we read the story in this morning's paper about the family with three girls serving in Iraq, and one recently killed. Our fathers went off to WWII and were gone for years at a time with no phone cards, no email. Casualties were in the thousands, week in and week out. My grandfather went off to fight in WWI, where we lost some 50,000 men in a single four-week period in the summer of 1918.

This is - and always has been - the price of freedom, and the soldiers know it. Perhaps, in our modern volunteer military, they join up for job training and education benefits, but the bottom line always has been that a soldier may have to fight and die. We've become spoiled and soft, and all too willing for someone else to make the sacrifices. Another WWII memory of my mother's - ration stamps, no gasoline, no butter. Would we put up with that today? I wish I could say with confidence that the American people would be willing to make whatever sacrifice were necessary for the cause of freedom and justice, especially after the attacks of Sept 11, but it isn't likely.

Liz Smith reports:

DENNIS HOPPER is the "Easy Rider" star-director who grew up surrounded by Democrats. In the '60 he marched with Martin Luther King and protested the Vietnam War.

But did you know that he is now a political conservative and has been since Ronald Reagan? He says, "I liked [Bill] Clinton, but I voted for Bush Sr. And I'm definitely voting for [George W.] Bush again."

Mr. Hopper's wife Victoria is a passionate Democrat who has raised money for John Edwards and John Kerry. Of her Democratic passions, Hopper says to the London Times: "I support Bush and I support my wife and what my wife's involved in. That's all. We don't talk politics. I respect her things, and you know, whether she respects mine doesn't really matter to me."

Putting women into combat units was a horrificly bad idea - even the Israeli's have seen the stupidity of this move and have removed all females from their combat units.

If women must fight, let it be after every man has been killed and the enemy is at their front door: then they can blast away.