Medals for Drone Operators Canceled

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/us/politics/medals-for-drone-warriors-canceled.html?ref=us

With all due respect ... Outfinstanding!  One, it seems to me, has to credit Hagel's personal combat experience in Nam, his character and also his responsiveness to outside pressure groups.  Yes, I know that I just suggested a positive value to outside pressure groups.  I was initially conflicted when I wrote that because my current perspective has been of the "moneyed" groups successfully exercising influence in both executive and legislative matters to the detriment of the general welfare of the nation.  Here, the groups were assemblies of veterans and their supporters who influenced some in Congress and to some degree Sec. Hagel.  Here these veterans, in groups and individually, brought petitions on an issue relevant to them yet not for their personal selfish advancement and not merely with checkbooks. Certainly, there is the inherent political element of the number of votes at issue but that is and should be the nature of this beast.  For once, it worked righteously.

A Fool Speaks of Combat

 One Eliot Cohen has written an opinion piece in the Washington Post this January 9th.  It is a criticism of the appointment of former Senator Chuck Hagel to become the Secretary of Defense. You can look the article up if you wish but I have no desire to further publish this man's writing.  I will focus on only two lines because having read them I was immediately held in astonishment and anger.  My astonishment grew when I researched and found out Cohen's background, a search I will again leave to you.

"Does combat service uniquely produce empathy with the troops, an awareness of the horrors of wounds and violent death? Visits to a military hospital will bring one to that. " This is the statement, to be respectful of his career, of an academician. This is also, to be accurate, the statement of a fool who has never served as an infantryman in life and death combat. Deficient as he is in judgment and understanding, he is adept at rhetorical babble. Ask a soldier or veteran about the pride in wearing a Combat Infantryman Badge such as the one Hagel earned. Ask a veteran who has been shot at or blown into the air with metal fragments piercing his body and tearing off the head of the man next to him just what comparison there is in a "Bob Hope" walk down a hospital ward. I am surprised that Cohen, someone who has purported to have studied generic "war" would make such an inane comparison. I am perplexed as to how someone holding such a view could be accepted as some sort of expert in military matters. I am angered and insulted, as an Infantry combat veteran as is Hagel, by his statement. Someone sitting on a Congressional panel before which he will undoubtedly testify should demand an apology on behalf of combat veterans before accepting his credentials on anything much less war.