One of the seminal photographs of my war was this one of the young, naked Vietnamese girl fleeing the horrors of combat, taken in June 1972, five years after I decided to leave the Army and pursue a college degree under the newly-reinstated G.I. Bill. Like the tens of millions, perhaps more, around the world, who saw that photo, I was horrified, perhaps more than most, because I had been there and seen worse.  That picture brought all that collateral killing and wounding of those innocents caught in the war's crossfires back, to me far too vividly.

Nothing has haunted me more from my tour as an infantry NCO in Vietnam than the now blessedly fading memories of children caught up in the violence they could not comprehend. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a bleeding heart; I'm a staunch supporter of America's military might being employed to defend our interests. But that doesn't mean I have to ever accept the killing of innocents that always seems to accompany military operations. For that reason, I will always consider John Kerry to be beneath contempt, because he made this gullible nation and an even more gullible world believe that young men like me, doing our best to defend the innocent, were cold-blooded killers of those innocents.

We weren't.

We tried to protect them as best we could but that effort was hamstrung by the fact that we were Caucasians operating in an oriental environment; I was automatically suspect among the native Vietnamese I dealt with because of my Scot-Irish blue eyes, which they probably saw as colonial French. Simply put: they didn't trust the Round-eyes, blatant but understandable racism on their part. But it was racism that killed them. We did try; as an NCO, I came down hard on any of my troops I saw being harsh or cruel to the locals. It did little good in the long run because the worldwide leftist propaganda machine saw it to be in their political interest to portray American soldiers as cold, heartless, soulless baby killers, the exact opposite of what we were. We were tried and convicted by the media and the Democrat Party and whipped through endless media distortions of battlefield events up that long hill to our Golgotha where John Kerry personally nailed us to his cross of pure political ambition.

All this is prefatory to my response to a photo I came across today in my daily searching of the web. This picture of this toddler caught up in mindless terrorist violence in Nairobi melted this old soldier's heart. More importantly, and far more significantly for my enemy, those who perpetrated this atrocity upon these helpless civilians a world away from my comfort haven, this picture solidifies in my mind just who it is that is mine, my nation's, and civilization's real enemy. Events like this and the pictures they produce serve only to harm the Islamic cause, as they fill stubborn old men such as me, all round the world, with a cold resolve to never negotiate nor compromise with such evil beings as you, but only to kill you using whatever means and methods are required.

Count on this: We are going to hunt you down and kill you...