Kill the Right Ones

We went to Vietnam to stop communism!...
We shell women and children!
--Born on the 4th of July (1989)
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Ranger is a violent man and is filled with hostility which is often not outer-directed. On this 4th of July he does not fear terrorists or any other potential threat to America because violent men are understandable and easily foiled by sidestepping, and applying either logic or superior force.

Ranger controls his violence with isolation and prescription drugs. Since a nation is nothing but a collection of individuals, why doesn't the U.S. check its violent impulses in an appropriate manner?

Consider isolation as a reasonable alternative to aggression and elective wars. America is still a very defensible country. We are protected by natural barriers that neither the Nazis, Japanese nor Soviet Communists could neutralize, and this remains true to this day. Terrorists may strike tactically into the U.S., but they can never achieve strategic success.

When we are told otherwise, we are being sold an artificial product called "unreasonable fear".

In Ranger's Army, violence was called valor and rewarded with neat little pieces of colored ribbon. Ranger regrets the violence in which he participated, and grieves the fact that we often kill the wrong people. It sure would feel good to kill the right people.

In the Vietnam war, the U.S. military killed the Vietcong and North Vietnamese by the bulldozer load, yet now they are our trading buddies. In Korea it was the ChiComs, and today we are economically intertwined. What a difference a day makes.

In another manifestation of violence, for those of us who served in Vietnam it was not the VC or NVA that sprayed us with Agent Orange and Pink which installed a slow-burn death sentence into our bodies, but rather our own grateful nation.

Happy 4th of July. Even if you dipped me in red-white-and -blue paint, this day would just be another in a long road march.