Here is another example of the type of journalists who earlier decryed "hillbilly armor" now being shocked, shocked that Marines like a good fight and are willing to say so. In G. Gordon Liddy's book, When I was a a Kid, This was a Free Country, there is a story about Eleanor Roosevelt being upset that Seventh Infantry Division on Okinowa went into battle with a skull of a dead Imperial Japanese Army soldier lashed to a post on the front of their tanks. Mrs. Roosevelt, in a Saturday Evening Post article she authored (the most widely read US publication of that time), said that the soldiers should not be permitted back into the US until they had been "re—civilized."

It is one thing for a High Society grandmother who was born in 1884 like Mrs. Roosevelt to see the world in this way. It is quite another for all of us who now know of the brutality of World War II and later conflicts. It was another former Marine foot soldier, Sen. Zell Miller, who said (and I paraphrase) we can not defend our country with mere spitballs.

Jack Kemp   2 6 05