Lovely little world of goodness and purity you got there. Heh!

Although you are correct about deplorable American behavior in SE Asia -- starting with deploying there in the first place -- your attitude about the soldiers who served is not justifiable. Most who weren't acutually drafted were elistees who joined because they feared being drafted. Those few who went to Vietnam willingly did so because they were mislead and thought they were serving their country.

You know those close-minded people who claim that others don't support the troops? They're talking about you. And in your case, they are quite correct.

How you see it is how you see it.

As I see it, if Sen. Obama asks Sen. Hagel to serve as SecDef, Sen. Hagel will serve - that's the kind of person he is. And that's more to the point of JNagarya's comment - those of us who were on active duty in the early sixties were imbued with a notion of service, based on an oath to the Constitution which we took seriously. We went to Viet Nam because our nation ordered us to go. We went aremed with the notion that we wouldn't obey an illegal order, an idea which is clearly laid out in Article 38 of the UCMJ. Like most of us, I was never given an illegal order - CPT Medina and LT Calley aside. I think Sen. Hagel carries that same old fashioned, in some people's view beknighted, sense of duty to their sworn and accepted duty - one which you don't lay down even in retirement - "this we'll defend".

Do I think Viet Nam was a just war? No, because I know a hell of a lot more today than I did when I was twenty-five. But war and injustice seem to me to be inextricably linked, and even those few which history "sort of" calls just wars had major cases of injustice. Certainly our present war has/does. Sen. Hagel's sense of duty seems to me to be the kind of antidote we need for our present political malaise.