Our Military: Mercenaries Or?

A few folks - one notably - have posted about our military being a mercenary entity. And that person in particular has some perspective on the matter, I feel, because he's done something I have not: he's fought in a bloody war that we invented (that notable one before Iraq).

While I agree that our leaders use our forces as mercenaries, I don't think the young men and women who sign up understand it as such. Hell, it's taken me til nearly mid-life to understand that terrible fact myself. We're force-fed on noble stories of WWI and WWII, we glorify heroes of the war - and I'm not even saying we should not.

But it's way past time for an open discussion - not on TV but in every American kitchen, every diner and barbershop and standing in the aisles at Costco - about how we use and abuse our military for our leaders' nefarious purposes. Not just gripe either - we need to decide what WE can do about it, change it, demand that our military gets used for real purposes of protection and not for cooked wars and not to protect the overseas holdings of American companies who increasingly pay NO taxes here.