Cleveland Plains Dealer's

Dick Feagler has an excellent piece regarding Mr. Bush's military period and feels that the president would have benefited from time in the trenches.

I think there's some validity in that statement, and it applies to any commander in chief rather than simply to Mr. Bush. I suspect those who have served in war overall would be far more thoughtful and deliberate in their exercise of military means because they would know what being in the trenches truly means.

While Mr. Bush can swagger around in a flightsuit, he'd long lost his pilot status to deserve to do so. And while others were serving and dying in Vietnam, this week's Village Voice states that the cocky Mr. Bush had his feet up in a candidate's office, talking about how much he'd had to drink the night before, and enjoying his status as "God's gift to women."

Thus, I'm not sure Mr. Bush had any way to perceive of what war means on the ground. He wasn't a conscious being when his father served, and he'd never served himself. In fact, none of his immediate family has known war from an enlisted man's - or woman's - perspective. He may have ordered people executed in Texas, but he was far from the switch.

I suspect it's a lot different when your finger is on the switch or the trigger and far different when the results of those actions lie before you, in blood, in fragments, and in horror. My peace stance was formed on stories of my father in WWII and my brother and cousins in Vietnam. They saw and through them, I feel I saw. As a child, I slept in a room where my father's Japanese sword ("taken off a dead Jap") hung in the closet not more than 10 feet from my bed. Few nights went by when I didn't wonder about the man who lost that sword and about his family.