The Western Cannons

Bob Herbert produces more pablum than Mead Johnson, but this is especially squishy. While it is surely tragic that poor young people devoid of other opportunities for economic self-sufficiency are press-ganged by circumstance into the service of America's death factories, please, save me the histrionic lionization. The tragedy is not that their heroism is underappreciated but rather that their sacrifices are vain and futile at best, evil at worst, since they are in the service of an evil enterprise, even if they, themselves, are fine and upstanding men and women. Their sacrifices are devoid of honor. Honor has been denied to them. They have been dishonored by the project in which they participated. That is what we ought to be lamenting--that thousands of our poor are being sullied forever by their participation in these vicious and aggressive wars.