June 27: Legal Rights
I am totally blown away by Tyler Paper's recent poll that showed one in three approve of enemy combatants captured on the battlefield receiving the same legal rights as peaceful American citizens. That gives new meaning to "love thine enemy."
One morning while flying helicopter gun ships in Vietnam, my fire team was called upon to destroy a Viet Cong communications station. We did so, but two of the enemy made it out alive and started down the river in a sampan. They had thrown away their weapons, so rules of engagement prevented us from blowing them away.
Updating that event to today, I could have been able to land on the river bank, capture them, and given them each a first class airline ticket to Washington D.C. where they would have been possibly housed in a luxurious brownstone walkup of a liberal Supreme Court Justice while they worked on their keynote speeches to the Democratic National Convention.
Because of this ruling, enemy combatant battlefield deaths will rise, and rightly so. The new military battlefield policy regarding causalities will surely be "don't ask, don't tell." American troops will never again be allowed to defend this nation on foreign battlefields. The fighting will all be here at home. And, if an enemy combatant is fortunate enough to be captured, it will be taken directly to its court-appointed attorney's office, coddled, and rewarded.
America will have gotten what it deserves.
Rod Whalen
Tyler
Rod Whalen
Tyler
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