I've been watching Spielberg/Hanks' Band of Brothers (again) every night for the past week on the History Channel. The WWII series instills in me great pain, pride and awe.
War between clear, present and UNIFORMED enemies is apparently a thing of the past. The uniformed part is what makes our war on terror so maddeningly questionable. Are we killing the bad guys or not? How can our soldiers tell? How does the lack of an easily identifiable enemy weigh on the decisions a warrior must make to kill and the conscience of that warrior if he killed, not knowing, for sure, that his target was his enemy?
Uniforms save innocent lives. Combatants who do not clearly identify themselves as such are as much to blame for "collateral damage" as the soldier who pulls the trigger, but the uniformed force that pulls the trigger inevitably gets painted as an indiscriminate army when civililians are slain by mistake. A fighting force who chooses to blend with the civilian population dooms inhabitants of the very civilization they are fighting to preserve. Such combatants are not deserving of the term "soldier".
8:21:03 PM 
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