Reply #41: This young man was Korean, not "white", adopted as 2 yr. old.

[Divernan]

Too sad that his adoptive parents who lived in a half million dollar home did not influence him to go to college instead of enlisting straight out of high school. From the articles about him, he seems to have been a fine young man who was desperately trying to be a patriotic American.

By the way, although it's been years since I lived in
California, I would expect a halfmillion dollar house to be basically a 3 bedroom, 2 bath tract house, and if the family has lived there for 20 years, I expect they are just regular working stiffs who happened to live somewhere where property prices skyrocketed. This kid, like many others, probably had a choice between incurring massive student loan debt, or joining the military. There is a swiftly growing gap between the rich and the poor, and most middle class families are slipping toward the poor end of that divide. College educations have spiraled in cost, out of the reach of many families who want their kids to go to college. That's why so many white kids are in the national guard or enlisted in the regular military. Killing the Pell grants for many kids will create even more cannon fodder for Bush's war machine.

I think one of the reasons the military are unable to meet their recruitment/enlistment goals is that American blacks learned a valuable lesson from the Vietnam war, and have not been such easy targets of military recruiters.