Who serves, and who is served?

[Mairead]

I am of the Vietnam generation and growing up, I knew many veterans. My father was a veteran of World War II; his best friend had been a prisoner of war in Germany. I grew up with his stories of his ship going down in the Pacific during the Battle of Okinawa, and the physical evidence of his service--a strange deformity on his head where they replaced part of his skull after he was nearly killed by a piece of shrapnel. In his generation and class, all the young men who could, had served including one of my professors at the University of San Francisco who had been a prisoner of war and survived the Bataan Death March. His body broken by torture, he died while I was in college; he was barely fifty. Another of my professors was a Polish paratrooper who fought for the Allies, surviving countless jumps into Poland to work with the Resistance. Many of my classmates were Vietnam veterans, desperately trying to make up for the years they lost in that terrible war.
...
Our present leaders urge war but they don't have to put their lives on the line; they can just talk about heroism and giving one's life for one's country, and look resolute - President Bush's favorite word without considering the cost in human suffering to our own people. The suffering of the innocent Iraqi civilians is relegated to the category of collateral damage, as if only buildings and vehicles would be destroyed. President Bush speaks admiringly of the sacrifice that they will make, but we didn't see George W. or Dick Cheney serve in Vietnam. Bush and Cheney's daughters are too old to serve. Why is it all right to sacrifice someone else's children?

Dra. Rosa Maria Pegueros
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0213-03.htm