The American Spectator

Our “volunteer” military is primarily made up of people who need the meager health and housing benefits they provide (which, as you know, are being cut). Many of our war supporters “choose not to serve” simply because they are not desperate enough to enlist.

Now we are in a time of many disasters, simultaneously. The Iraq quagmire continues to fester, and there are over 6,000 National Guardsmen from Mississippi and Louisiana who can’t do the jobs they signed up for because they’re bogged down in the Middle East.

The military is desperately in need of new people, and yet there are millions of healthy young American men in their 20s who are college-educated, fluent in English and supportive of the war, but those fellows are just too busy making money and going to parties to even consider getting their pretty hands dirty.

You say that we who oppose the war are stupid and hate America, but in a time of crying need, these boys say, essentially, “I don’t have to go to Iraq, and you can’t make me.” If this is how they show their love of country, I’m glad they don’t love me.

I don’t know where you were on 9/11, but I was six blocks away from the Twin Towers with my daughter, on her fourth day of kindergarten. We walked home two miles in the smoke because the subways and buses stopped running. If anyone wants terrorism to end, it’s me.

We considered moving away, but decided that if we left the home and school we love because of fear, then the terrorists would have won. My wife and I fight the war on terror in our small way by raising our child here, and I changed my career to teach English to immigrants, so they feel more assimilated.

p>Webster’s defines “hypocrisy” as “a pretense of virtue,” and anyone of fighting age who supports the war but “chooses not to volunteer” proves himself by definition to be a hypocrite and, yes, a chickenhawk. br> — David Jenkins br> New York, New York /p>