This Pork Eating Crusader Patch Is A Huge Hit With {german} Troops In Afghanistan

[bhikkhu]

93. Which is one thing I think about as well

- though at the moment you could say its beside the point, as the troops aren't "ours" anyway.

But my original thought was of a son of a guy who was my neighbor a few years back. The kid was always some trouble or other, playing jokes and getting into all the regular messes kids get into, and seemed headed nowhere good by the time he was about 16. He wasn't serious about anything, least of all school, didn't care about the what he was going to do tomorrow any more than he cared about what he did yesterday, and hung out mostly with a bunch of no-account kids who were unlikely to stay out of jail for long (this is how his dad tells it).

Anyway, 9-11, they watch the towers go down, and the next day his son says he's thought it through - the first serious decision of his life - and he wants to join the military. His dad gave him a rash of crap about how he wouldn't last a month, how he'd never get in with his grades, and how you don't just go in because you're mad and want to kick ass, because that's not how it works.

The kid comes back with how he'll get his grades up, whatever it takes, he'll stick with it because he's made up his mind, and he doesn't want to kick ass - he wants to protect people.

And then he did all that, and two tours in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan, and he's out now and going to college.

Now, he wasn't ever the best and the brightest, and I don't know how it was for him over there, but I imagine it was hard to fight in a war that was increasingly pointless as it went on - to go in with all the right reasons and see it all turn to crap. But I think that's more the kind of kid who went into the service and is still there - usually good at heart, breakable but determined, and I'd make plenty of allowances for a sense of humor if it lets a guy keep his perspective.

In a way, that makes the crusader label kind of fitting - they were plenty of the rich guys who went, but mostly it was regular guys who were talked into "the cause" because they were the sort who wanted to do something important and something right. Of course, there were atrocities on both sides of that, and most of those guys never came home. The crusades were a big con job that failed, which I think many of the guys coming home today can relate to.