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Recently, I bought and began playing "Call to Duty: Pacific Assault" a First-Person Shooter set in WWII.

I am a pampered baby boomer, too young for Vietnam, too old for anything else, 46 and have never had my life on the line (well, except for an armed robbery in a Radio Shack I was working at twenty years ago.) But mostly, the roughest thing I have been in has been an occasional car accident.

This game really made me appriciate what our fathers (and theirs before them, for that matter) lived through. Even in simulation, the experience of walking through a South Pacific jungle, listening for the snap of a twig, and wondering if death was up in the trees, was an education for me.

Many of us in here really have no idea. We respect the military and their bravery and sacrifice, but we have no idea of what it is to really go through it. How much worse must it be for the defeatocrats, the Europe-lovers, the Lefties and the "journalists" who blather on about "what America REALLY should be doing right now."

If you get a chance, play this game. And I'd like to see all the nay-sayers dropped in the middle of a real South Pacific jungle sixty plus years ago to see what real bravery is.

Good morning.

The VA shrink thinks I'm crazy to play shooters, but the bottom line is that they help me sleep. I stop for awhile and I start to get twitchy and have difficulty sleeping again.

A side effect is that they helped me recover from a stroke because of the need to manipulate the keys despite my paralysis , and the need to engage the brain in problem solving under stress. I'll never recover completely, but I can rack the slide on my pistols and hunt virtual Nazis and Commies, so I can live with it.

There were moments in the Games 'Vietcong', 'Men Of Valor' and 'Brothers in Arms' that made me sweat, but I was very calm and relaxed after I had figured out how to survive. I assume that I'll figure out the psychology involved someday.

Michael Frazier