Sitting in a bunker in the sun, while staring at a bridge for 4 hours gives me some time to think. There's a few things that have been pissing me off lately. The top of the list today is the phrase "I support our troops." I want to know how. In case you haven't been watching the news, some guys from 3rd ID spoke for the bulk of us when they said they'd like Rumsfeld's resignation. This was reitterated in the July 29 Doonsbury. So what are our "supporters" doing exactly? I haven't heard reports of a widespread demand for the resignation of the top civilians in the DOD. I haven't heard of anyone surrounding the UN building and demanding a mandate so that these other countries will send their troops. I haven't heard of any marches on Washington demanding the dissolution of NATO as a result of the reluctancy of our partners to participate. So far, all this "support" has been lip service. If we wanted lip service, we'd hire prostitutes! Another thing, where are the Million Mom Marchers? There has been a shit load of gun violence going on here. Almost every house has an AK47. Not a single person I've come across has the first clue about weapon safety - they usually run around with the selector on auto. I guess their purpose is shreading the Constitution, not ending gun violence. Why is it that certain groups can field a thousand people to protest the WTO, but they can't get a single person to protest the use of military forces in Iraq. This isn't a miliary mission - it's a humanitarian one now - send in the Peace Corp. Finally, why do we send in infantry - people who are trained to kill from day one - to do police work? People bitch and complain about the excessive use of force in capturing or killing people. The civilians have no clue what's going on over here. We are slated to work for 365 days straight - none off, working at least 16 hr days, and on call 24 hours a day. That in itself is stressful. Throw in a hot environment, 50 pounds of gear that doesn't breathe, and a workplace where people are actively trying to kill you, but you can't do anything about it, and you have a shit load of stress. When people are under stress long enough, they tend to revert to reflexive actions. That means that using infantry as police is going to result in some civilian getting shot because he moved his ca forward after being told to stop while US forces were crossing a road. It almost happened the day we were ambushed. Luckily the guy on the trigger is used to a bit more stress than most people. One of our 18 year old probably would have ventilated the guy. If you want to stop crime, you use police. If you want to go house to house searching and try to minimalize collateral damage, you pick infantry. We aren't trained to be nice. Our doctrinal mission is to close with and destroy the enemy, not sit back and wait to be attacked because we don't want to offend the local populace by cordoning off their neighborhoods, kicking their doors in, and searching for things hat can kill us. This whole mission could be accomplished by a few MPs, the CIA, and the peace corp.