CLIFFORD HOLLIDAY
Age: 104
Gardena, California
Private, 43rd Battalion, Camrom Highlanders
After more than two years in the trenches, he was relieved to get out. "Who wouldn't be?" he asks. "Anybody who wants war is just a few steps out of the caveman age. Nobody can go through that and wish it on the human race again."
He was loading detonators into hand grenades on a moonlight night somewhere in Belgium about half a kilometre from the front line, when the bullet sheared through the "meat" of both his legs, just above the ankle. "I thought somebody had lashed me," he recalls. He spent three weeks in a field hospital and re-turned to the trenches.
Before he was injured a second time - his jaw shredded by flying shrapnel - he had survived the onslaught at the Battle of Vimy Ridge and seen the carnage of Hill 60, when his battalion went in with 1,100 men and came out with 127.
The fact is that only idiots support any war. There is absolutely no justification for any
aggression against Iraq. After three months, there has been absolutely no discovery of any
prohibited weapons, and there is almost certainly none to come. The exercise is just a charade by
dubya to impose an imperialistic gauntlet over a sovereign yet strategic nation.
The secondary joke is that some nations state that inspections have been fruitful, and that the military pressure helps. What bullshit, the inspectors have found absolutely nothing! What about the missiles, you ask? Well, the missiles, excluding any payload, with a potential range just slightly over the allowed 150 km, were voluntarily divulged in the 12 000+ page document the Iraqis handed over to the UN in December. This is nitpicking at best, but I see it as an attempt by the far more rational UN inspectors to maintain their status and keep the mad moron at bay, so I can live with them.
In the interim, the only thing falling faster then the stock markets and the U.S.A. dollar, is the respect for justice and liberty that the U.S.A. has built up over decades. Many nations and people the world over have historically looked up to the U.S.A. as a bastion of fairness and justice in this world. Now, with the U.S.A. supporting torture, murder, political imprisonment, and armed invasion, the respect has disintegrated to that reserved for third world dictatorships.