My father took shrapnel during World War II in the Aleutians. After his death, when I was very young, my surrogate father for two years was a career Marine who fought in Korea. Having loved and respected them both, I still have a rather healthy respect for the military and those who serve.

Perhaps this is why I am so furious that our president — who never served in the Army and dodged his National Guard duties in Alabama — and the "chicken hawks" with no battle experience who surround him are so eager to send our kids off to a pointless war in Iraq, all in the cause of supporting America’s Big Oil plunderers.

Many of these servicemen and -women are people who admirably signed up to fight for the United States in response to 9/11. Iraq is not 9/11. It is a contrived, distorted attempt to demonize one person — Saddam Hussein — making him the whole reason why the US is despised abroad, with Dubya looking like a tinhorn diplomat. Simply a bad premise, but we’ve allowed the administration to build upon it. Castles in the sand.

It is very easy — as well as cowardly and ethically bankrupt — to make other people’s children do your dirty work. One can easily imagine young George Bush paying his elementary-school friends to fight his battles for him. I doubt he was ever in a real fight in his life — unless it was a fight with pom-poms at 10 paces at Andover cheerleading practice. He sure has no qualms about sending America’s young men and women — not his own daughters, mind you — into a senseless battle based on a fictitious rationale. And don’t look for anyone with the surnames Rumsfeld, Perle, or Wolfowitz to be leading the charge into Baghdad either.

I was in college when Selective Service drew numbers to determine who might experience the joys of Vietnam during monsoon season. Many of my friends now have children who, if we go to war with Iraq, might face a similar situation. These parents range from liberal academics to conservative, former state troopers who have served in the Army. I have yet to see any of them do anything other than bow and shake their heads at the thought of their child going to the Middle East to fight for a nonexistent cause.

Who is George Dubya Bush sending to war? You. Or, if you’re old enough, your kids. Those who aren't rich will take the incoming, while Bush’s daughters and the offspring of his political cronies — and of those across the congressional aisle on the Democratic side — will be doing tequila shooters after another tough week of attending classes at prep schools, Yale, Texas A&M, and other universities.

I wouldn’t have fought in Vietnam even if my number had come up as a low ball. And if I were 20 today, and facing a war with Iraq, I wouldn't even consider being dragooned off to Iraq to make sure some oil-business suit can make the payment on his Mercedes or grab lunch on Capitol Hill with Big Time Cheney.

After the Vietnam War was over, it took another 10 years before I realized why the draft board for Fairfield County, Connecticut — the place where I grew up and one of the richest suburban areas in the country — was located in Bridgeport, a poverty-stricken shit hole. The good fathers of Fairfield realized that if and when the draft ever came up — as it did, with fangs bared — the local quota would be quickly filled by the poor white, black, and Hispanic kids from the city before ever getting close to college-deferred wonder boys from Westport, New Canaan, and Greenwich. This realization shamed and humiliated me like nothing I had ever felt. And it made me sick to hear about the experience of Vietnam from friends and relatives who served there — almost all of whom came back with a variety of visible and invisible wounds.

George Bush and his cronies are sending other people’s children to die for a bogus cause. It’s becoming more and more evident every day, as the lies about US motives come flying in from Washington. Mothers and fathers must be looking anew at their teenage sons and daughters, and considering what a hideous fate they may face. Perhaps it is time for them, and all of us, to say to the Bush administration and its armchair generals, "We regret to inform you ... that our child is not fighting your dirty war."

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