[CaptainCrunch]

I've never believed in the argument that just because you believe in a war or a cause or a situation that you neccessarily have to actively serve in the delivery of it.

When someone says in a debate point that if you have such a strong belief in the war in Iraq or the war in afghanistan you should enlist and go fight in that war to prove your belief. the beauty of a free society and a volunteer military is that you don't have to serve to believe, you can have an opinion and its just as valid whether you serve or not. Calling those kids, and to me they are kids cowards is disparate because you don't know those kids, you don't know if thier medical reasons are real or not. you also don't know how many kids said that they would serve and this film maker cut them out of his film because they went against his argument.

To be honest, I served in two UN peacekeeping deployments, and I didn't serve because I believed in the UN's ability to keep the peace, or I believed that my actions could bring about peace. To be honest, I deployed because I had friends of mine go, and I had loyalty to them, and I had loyalty to the poor smuck that was caught between two warring sides that would slaughter them without thoughts. But I didn't and still don't believe that the UN is an effective counter to war.

Personally the kids in this movie might value thier lives above politics or cause, and you have to respect that to some effect.

There have been politicians who didn't serve in the military and have no concept of what war is really all about and they're more then willing to send young men and woman into thier own personal version of hell. Does that mean that only people who have "bucked up" and served in the military should be allowed to hold office? Or to have any kind of opinion on the war in Iraq or Afghanistan?

I also hold a lot of resentment towards the film maker in this instance and others that actively seek out the most radical opposite of thier own beliefs or the mis-informed or the just plain stupid and then try to paint everyone on one side of the political spectrum with the same brush. Its similar to how some posters on this board jumped all over the post about Liberal's being smarter then Conservatives.

I'm certainly not some gun toting war mongering ######ed hick from Alabama or Regina, but my views are certainly right of center. But at the very least I believe that these young republicans can have an opinion on something, but that dosen't obligate them to lay thier lives on the line.

From a personal point of view, I certainly hope that the military still filters out recruits who join for either one specific purpose, ie I want to fight in Iraq, or who join up just to prove something to thier friends or neighbours. Those make the most dangerous and unrealiable recruits, because they're not committed to anything else but thier own personal crusade.

I had a DI, who was surprisingly was a woman who stood 5 feet tall, and was as mean as the morning sun on a hangover, and she eyed us balefully in my second week of basic and simply stated. "Your not here to prove your intentions to me, or your parents, or your best friend, your here to prove youself to you and nobody else"

But its late and I'm rambling.