You men are professional killers, the Drill Instructor growled.

As an 18-year-old Marine standing at attention, those chilling words were a shock. But they were true. Many weeks of boot training in Marine boot camp, Parris Island, South Carolina, had taught me how to place an armor piercing slug into a target the size of a mans chest at 500 yards. I knew how to disable a tank with an Energa grenade and to destroy an enemy target with the worlds first assault weapon, the Browning automatic rifle. I had been trained to kill with the bayonet. A week later Sgt. Driscoll, one of four Dis that were with us throughout the long weeks of Marine boot camp, made a speech that has stayed in my memory ever since. We were the barrier that protected our friends, neighbors, he told us, and especially our mothers from the terrible threat we faced in the world. As he spoke the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I snuck a glance at my fellow Marine recruits on my left and right. Their cheeks were wet with tears as well. It was the height of the cold war and we all believed that war could break out at any time. Americans, of course, would never start a war; the conflagration would be ignited by our enemies. Many years later, the Soviet Union collapsed and those with open minds realized that the fearful Red menace had been a myth. The cold war was over and now we could enjoy the peace dividend. Over the years many lessons could have been learned. The police action in Korea had become an undeclared war that has still not ended. The undeclared war in Vietnam ended with a humiliating defeat in spite of the 50,000 Americans and countless Vietnamese that gave their lives in a cause based on a false premise. The war was lost, so where was the domino effect that our leaders had held over our head for so many years? New generations of Marines fought in Grenada. Where is it? Americans asked. We had to protect Americans. The Americans we were protecting were young medical students who were studying in Grenada because of the high costs of American medical schools. Somehow, none of those students, abruptly ripped out of school, thanked Reagan for the interruption in their medical education. Did many of them manage to become doctors after all? Who knows? Who cares? Not their government that crushed their dreams. Then there was the assault on Panama. We had to invade because Manuel Noriega was in league with the drug lords. Wasnt that the same Noriega that had been on our payroll? Of course, but now he had pissed off our president so people,a few Americans, but mostly Panamanians had to die. This was a prelude to a similar event years later, when that Presidents son sacrificed the lives of several thousand Americans and countless Iraqis after justifying an invasion by totally unsubstantiated claims that the American homeland was threatened. When these claims proved groundless, the President shrugged. He tried to kill my dad, he said. More than a decade later, were still there and still dying for the lies we were told. Every year we celebrate Veterans Day to honor those who have risked their lives to protect us. Ironically, that day began after the end of World War I as Armistice Day. That war, President Wilson said, was the war to end all wars and Armistice Day would celebrate the peace that was to last for all time.

Instead, that war did little but build the foundation for an even larger and bloodier War that would follow. Both of these wars began with a formal declaration of war by Congress as the U.S. Constitution clearly requires. Never again would we declare war. So in that sense, we have been at peace ever since. We even eliminated the cabinet post of Secretary of War. Taking our cues from George Orwells classic novel 1984, we no longer make war, we are in the business of defense. Defense, it turns out is much more expensive than war. It requires troops stationed all over the world. It demands assassination by drone of those deemed a threat by our President. It requires increasingly expensive and powerful advanced fighter aircraft even though there is no longer another nation in the world capable of surpassing what we already have. Most important, it requires the expenditure of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars many of which enrich corporations with close ties at the highest levels of government. Americans have always been proud of being number one. Well now we are the number one debtor in the world. We have the highest per capita number of prisoners in the entire world. We wear clothes, use appliances, watch televisions, and as I am doing write now, type on computers built for us in Asia. We all, veterans, civilians, soldiers, sailors, and marines, have a choice. We can continue down the path we are on. We can build more drones. We can give our political representatives more and more power. We can give up our rights to privacy as well as all others guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. We can create more and more illegal, undeclared foreign wars. We can continue to spend ourselves into bankruptcy while enriching the crony capitalists that finance and control our political machinery. We can continue to allow government to control us with phony warswars on terrorism, wars on drugs, wars on crime, wars of liberation that free no one. Or we can return to the founding principles of our nation. We should remain strong militarily but only strong enough to repel attack. We should remove from office those that seek to control us through fear. We should use our prodigious energies at home to build better lives for ourselves and our children. Its time to set our people free.