Today I saw a 21 year old soldier in the ASAP, Army Substance Abuse Program, because he showed up to morning formation with alcohol on his breath. He was taken to the MPs and had a positive breathalyzer for alcohol and was considered drunk on duty. He had 8 drinks the night before and he was not legally drunk the following morning, but faced an Article 15, loss of rank, pay and extra duty for his transgression. He has been drinking heavily since his return from deployment in Iraq. As he told me, he just wants to get out of the Army and go home to small town North Carolina. In truth, he does need help with his alcohol abuse before he turns into the mean drunk his father was. After we talked awhile he got up enough courage to ask me if I had been a paratrooper in the Army Air Force, perhaps thinking I go all the way back back to WWII. I told him I was in the Air Force and my war was Vietnam, adding this was well before he was born. He thought about it a minute and then he said he was not sure, but he thought he maybe had heard of Vietam. He was a tall, thin dark haired country boy, but he was not ignorant or stupid, but is witness to the fact Vietnam and the 50,000 thousand deaths has just about faded away for a large measure of our population. I suspect, in a few years, the 4,400 American deaths in Iraq and the detritus of the injured will not even be specks of dust on the road of our military history. Is there any way to rescue this period of history from the trash heap and honor those who have fallen? To be even more morose, it feels like we are the Soviet Union after their disastrous misadventures in Afghanistan; quitting and whining away like a dog with its tail between its legs. We did the same thing in Vietnam. I still have vivid memories of the helicopters on the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. It is not that I have some enduring affection for these places and in fact I don’t think they are worth one American life. I just think how pissed I would be, to put it mildly, if one of my children, or God forbid one of my grandchildren died in one of these wars: ill conceived and then abandoned.