The Partisan Divide on Issues

[David Horn]

(02-01-2020, 11:34 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Well, I built a successful career from the bottom up and built an American business from the ground up so to speak and paid a lot of taxes ( Company payroll  for 8 employees, personal income taxes, capitol gains taxes  and state and local taxes and state and federal unemployment tax and work comp insurance and so forth) while doing them. The government invested less than fifteen hundred dollars in my education via grants. I owed less than one thousand dollars in government backed low interest school loans. What you see written here required a lot of sacrifice  and financial risk to accomplish.

I won't argue your accomplishments in the business world, nor deny you credit for working hard and being frugal. That was not my point. My point has to do with flag-waving rhetoric, when 99% of Americans your age never served. You can thank Nixon for that, though it's now becoming painfully obvious that eliminating any mandatory form of service-to-country has been a tragic mistake. I got excoriated for saying so at the time.

Classic-Xer Wrote:You served in Vietnam, what did you actually do over there? Did you earn any metals, see any battles, dodge any bullets or see any armed Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army regulars at all? Did you enlist or were you drafted? I didn't have to volunteer for the Iraq war because the 1st Iraq war was more or less a cake wake as far as wars go that didn't require further enlistment. My buddy shot more Iraqi Republican Guard who were either ordering gunners via gun point or shooting unarmed Iraqi soldiers trying to surrender with machine guns. You see that was his job during the 1st Iraq war.

A lot of question there, but answering in Cliff Notes fashion: I wasn't in the infantry (11B20), so no battles. We got mortared on a semi-regular basis, but lost no one from my unit during the time it was deployed. And I enlisted, fwiw. Getting drafted was the best way to get assigned to 11B. My unit was a military extension of the NSA, so we were considered targets.

Classic-Xer Wrote:Me, I had several veterans in the family. I had a grandfather who was about to deploy to France when the 1st World War ended. I have a picture of him and in his buddies in their Dough Boy uniforms after completing basic training. He would have been over there but his battalion was depleted by influenza which delayed their deployment a few months as their ranks were replenished. I had two uncles who served during World War II. One of them us called back into service and served during Korea as well. My dad served during Korea. Another uncle served in Germany during its post war occupation. Me, I bounced around the idea of joining the Marine Corp after high school but my uncle told me that I'd be bored to death and get tired of being prepared and trained for a war that wouldn't occur and he was right about that back then. The mid to late 80's  would have been a boring time to be serving in the military. So, I took his advice and went to school for HVAC instead.

Most vets of those earlier wars said little about their service after returning home, because it was just that bad. WW-I: the trenches. WW-II: Marine assaults in the Pacific and any number of major battles in Europe. Korea: many battles in a very short time. Vietnam and the later wars are more familiar to most. In all cases, the potential of getting killed or injured was always there, even when things got boing. Again, that wasn't really my point.