Why am I not surprised? Same as it ever was.

Two years after Tet, the watershed of the Vietnam War, and just after the Cambodia incursion, which slowed down business on the Ho Chi Minh trail for a couple of months, I was TDY on an eight day mission to train ARVN scouts on how to spot trip wires and ambushes, how to check for booby traps on weapons cashes and how to conduct small element recon patrols along those infamous trails.

I was confounded by this assignment because like so many of us who had been encountering some of the world's best jungle fighters, I couldn't figure out why you would need to train the Vietnamese people to do things they had already demonstrated to be too damned good at. At least the NVA and the Cong were good at it. They lived out there in the boonies.

But once we dropped in and moved out, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. They were constantly clustering up, chatting, with their weapons at sling arms or just dragging at their sides. After about a half a click they were too hot so they started taking off their BDU tunics. They started griping that their packs were too heavy. A quick check of one guy's ruck revealed the reason. They had more cookware and cans of food than they did war fighting gear. It was like they thought this was a Boy Scout hike.

We moved off the trail at sundown and set up our NDP. They didn't fancy digging firing positions. I could only wonder if they set up their Claymores facing in instead of out. I was at wit's end when they pulled out all this cooking gear and began lighting a half dozen little fires to boil rice! I'd had it. I went to their sergeant and told him to get those damned fires out, no smoking, cold rats only, dig in, put out the OP/LPs, set the trip wires, shut the hell up and get some sleep.

A little while later, after everything was quiet, it started to rain. It rained hard. First I heard wimpering, then crying. A bunch of these guys were crying, huddled under their panchos in little groups, as miserable as wet cats.

I was so mad I couldn't sleep. At sun up, as we formed up the column to move out, I asked the ARVN sergeant just what the hell was going on here. It was then he gave me the awful truth. These guys were kids pulled off the streets of Saigon and drafted into the ARVN against their will. They were shanghaied. These were unwilling, unmotivated city street punks with less than eight weeks in uniform, walking on the most heavily traveled enemy trail system in Vietnam.

But if you looked at the Air Force TV film footage back at base camp, there were all these happy slappy film reports of highly motivated young patriots yelling fierce slogans, stabbing bayonets into straw dummies, firing M-16s, field stripping M-60s, throwing grenades etc. The training cadre, including Green Berets stood with their ARVN counterparts, hands on hips, swelling with pride at the new army they were creating to stop the NVA and bring freedom and democracy to South Vietnam.

The ARVN got everything they wanted. They even had the rare CAR-15s with 30-round magazines that we scouts had been requesting for months. The Green Barets are the best trainers in the world. Everything was in place to create the fighting force to match the NVA. Everything, except one thing: Fire in the belly. Belief in their cause. In a word, motivation.

By 1970, the South Vietnamese knew long before we did that the war was a losing proposition. They saw the writing on the wall. No amount of gung ho cheer leading and and confidence building could overcome the creeping dread that the South Vietnamese government leaders were a bunch of U.S. puppets who were going to bug out with the treasury one day and let the Commies come in.

And so it is in Iraq today. We still have the best fighting force in the world and our training cadres are the best. I've got no doubt that they could turn a girls high school volleyball team into knife-in-the-teeth LRRP's in a matter of months. That's not the problem.

The problem in Iraq is motivation. They ain't got it. They don't trust us. History shows that the American politicians will screw you every time. Never mind the news clips you see of full bird colonels standing around watching Iraqis training, barking "Outstanding!" As the Marines in Iraq will tell you (if the brass ain't around) is that when you go out on patrol with unmotivated indiginous forces, you're risking your own ass and you're doing 90 percent of the work they should be doing for themselves. It's their goddamn country. If they don't want to fight for it, there's not much we can do.

Isn't this just enough to make you want to piss your pants, or scream out loud?

Airport screeners are job force rejects who couldn't work anywhere else -- about one step below hamburger flippers.

Now, the government is going to give these morons a couple of weeks of training to become $8-an-hour psychologists who are going to not only bully you into taking off your shoes, wand you, make you dump your diaper bag, look at your pill bottles, and otherwise harrass you and make you so goddamn mad you could spit, but then they are going to haul you into a back room and give you a full body cavity search if you so much as bat an eye.

Bush said "They hate us for our freedom."

What fucking freedom?