I feel that every combat since Vietnam was not really a war except for the combatants. For Vietnam you could be drafted. There has been no real draft since. Our commitment and loss of U.S. soldiers in those combats since Vietnam have been much less except to the deployed and their kin.

Few of us felt impacts from those wars and many of us wish that we did not fight them.

I think we fought the last really war a long time ago now war is something different, except to the soldier. To a soldier it makes little difference if the war is huge or tiny, justified or not, for the soldier war is heaven and hell all in one.

Nothing make you feel more alive than proximity to death. After the intensity of combat, living the mundane is probably disappointing.

TEK