Reply #8: Detestable [View All]

[earthside]

This is why the recruitment of teenagers is detestable.

My son is almost seventeen. While they grow and learn and mature (to some extent) fast during these years, their ability to make wise, long range decisions is simply limited by their lack of life experience. This is exactly why, of course, militaries have historically recruited and drafted the very young.

And this part of the story is so predictable: "It's a story bound to inspire outrage in some households, especially those with war veterans. Oregon Army National Guard Sgt. John Larsen, who spent nine months in Iraq last year, called Adler's actions "laziness or cowardice, I don't know which." Larsen was in the right front seat of a Humvee on Sept. 25 when a roadside bomb detonated northwest of Baghdad, killing Spc. David W. Johnson, who was in the gun turret. "My gunner was a cook. He wasn't trained to be in the infantry," Larsen says. "But I tell you what, he did his job. He didn't run from it.""

I've really come to despise these macho war survivors who love to praise the dead. Talk about real cowards. This asshole Sgt. John Larsen is safe at home, probably considered a 'hero' by his friends and nieghbors, but he's alive while his cook is a corpse. So it is heroic to get blown-up in a gun turret? Doing a 'job' for which he was not trained? That sounds like stupidity to me. If this guy Larsen had any genuine courage, he'd be out defending young people like Adler and opposing this illegal and immoral war.