Interesting how things are turning out: jf kerry’s too stupid to get educated types are rolling up their sleeves, and putting down their M-4s to help another people make a life.

From a wonderful and detailed post by Michael Totten:

“This is my hardest deployment,” Marine Sergeant Cooley said as he unfastened his helmet and tossed it onto his bed. “We weren’t trained for this kind of thing.” He’s been shot at with bullets and mortars, and he’s endured IED attacks on his Humvee, but post-war Fallujah is more difficult and more stressful than combat. He isn’t unusual for saying so. Many Marines I spoke to in and around the Fallujah area said something similar.

“We’re trained as infantrymen,” Captain Stewart Glenn said. “But here we are doing civil administration and trying to get the milk factory up and running.”

“We make up all this stuff as we go,” Lieutenant Mike Barefoot added.

While most Americans go to school, work traditional day jobs, and raise their families, young American men and women like these are deployed to Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan where they work seven days a week rebuilding societies torn to pieces by fascism, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and war. It is not what they signed up to do. Some may have geeked out on nation-building video games like Civilization, but none of the enlisted men picked up any of these skills in boot camp.
[..]

Go, read, absorb and put it in your memory banks, for those years from now, when you meet an OIF vet, long removed from that part of their lives, now just looking like almost any other person i our nation, not wearing a uniform. Shake their hand. Tell them how much you appreciate that they would take up tools, instead of weapons or war, for those half way around the globe, to save them, and to thereby save us from harm.

I remain in awe of the compassion and dedication of those who have been trained to use violence in defense of this nation, and can put that aside for a greater purpose for all mankind.

I’ll venture to say, it will not be in me to ever thank a Democrat for the role they have played in signaling the enemy it is acceptable to kill ours and their own to support the political end game of a few power hungry people to the detriment of the rest of humanity. More souls have been lost in their pursuit of power, while our service men and women clean up behind them. But then. how could we expect anything else?