In my war some 38 years ago, the U.S. military had to have a sanitized euphemism to use when referring to the enemy. The name "Charlie" came into being through the military phonetic alphabet used when talking on communications radios so that even with a weak signal, the person receiving the transmission could understand. When referring to the Viet Cong, the local insurgent forces trying to unify Vietnam for the Hanoi government, our radio operators would use the phonetic Victor, for V, and Charlie for C. Thus Victor Charlie became the name of our enemy. Nice and clean.

But sadly, in order to kill other human beings, you can't give them nice names. They have to be dehumanized in order to hate them enough to slaughter them without hesitation or remorse. So we called them Gooks, Slopes, Zipperheads, Zips, Dinks, and several other racist and disgusting names. Senator John McCain called the Vietnamese "Gooks" for many years after his return from the Vietnam War. It was only at some point in the 1990s I believe when he finally declared that he would never use that term again.

So in this war, the military must find a non-specific name for the enemy that they can refer to in polite company and for talking to each other when civilians or the press happens to be listening in. While "Bubba" doesn't have a correlation to anything in the military phonetic, it does paint a bit of a derogatory image, but since it usually refers to some White hillbilly, who would protest?

But away from civilians and reporters, our soldiers and Marines do indeed have names for the insurgents they must kill. They call the insurgents "Hajis," and "Ragheads." Racist, for sure. Religiously bigoted, you bet.

It has become a moral contradiction once more, in this war as in mine, that as a soldier contemplates just what the hell he is doing in a foreign country, he must at once justify his killing of "Hajis" or "Gooks" but at the same time he has to view the local non-combatants as human beings that he was sent to liberate and give them freedom. At some point even the most thick-skulled and heavily indoctrinated infantryman has to come to this dichotomy.

But there is a big difference between living in a war zone and deliberately seeking to close with and kill an enemy and this new and modern stand-off method of operating a computer joy stick with a detached state of mind. The video killer will never have to actually smell freshly opened guts with the stink of human feces and the repellent smell of blood. He will never have to look into the dusty, contorted face of a young man his own age, his mouth open as if caught in mid-sentence, his lifeless eyes still seeming to stare at something in the distance. He'll never have to contemplate that somewhere within a mile or two of the man he just killed, is a family that doesn't yet know their son, their husband, their father, is lying dead and that you killed him.

If it is any consolation to anyone, the insurgents have derogatory, racist and bigoted names for our soldiers too. It helps them to justify to their conscience and their God that they aren't really killing human beings, just infidels.

And around and around we go. The human species is doomed to extinction because we can't escape this cycle.

That's all I know.

During the first Gulf War, a squadron of stealth bombers based in Italy were flying sortees over Iraq on a nightly basis. Although they were thousands of miles from the actual battlefield, these Air Force "ramp rats" who loaded the ordinance onto the bombers felt like they were not getting the fair share of the battlefield glory. After all, the "grunts" on the ground were getting Bronze Stars and the pilots in the stealth bombers were getting the Air Medal, but the bomb loaders were getting nothing. So they started bitching about it and before long an Air Force general tried to get the Pentagon to create a special combat service medal for the ramp rats so they would have something to show for their efforts. When the army and Marines found out about it, they were not pleased. The thought of a group of service people thousands of miles from the actual combat theater wanting their own combat medals was not only absurd, it was insulting to the men who actually closed with and killed the enemy nearly face to face.

We've come a long way since Gulf War I. But I suspect it won't be long before the people who sit in a darkened room, killing people from a thousand mile range, will demand their own combat medals.

With our new stand-off and kill weaponry, war is heck.

House Republicans walk out in protest over Democrats' vote to censure Miers and Bolten.

Bushy comes out, sees his shadow, and decides to cancel his "long planned" trip to Africa until Democrats cave in and give him the right to spy on Americans and give blanket immunity to the Telecoms that help him break U.S. law.