They are the only Americans that truly know the cost of freedom. In Pennsylvania there are 1.6 million Veterans. Sacred in the American budget process, woe be the politician who dares take a dollar from their entitlements. Woe be is right. Unlike the armies of consultants, planners, academics and dreamers who claim the right to live off the public dole when we support Veterans' rights we are paying a debt of honor.
Tradition lives on.
Like the typhus that choked them to death at Valley Forge and the malaria that strangled them at Bataan, today their 20 year old lungs are threatened by Iraq's anthrax. All people are equal in death, but they don't die equally. Their risk is in the hands of people who now make decisions with sympathy for political correctness rather than sound strategic doctrine. Virtually all those decisions in the last six years have been bad ones for the front line military. While the Secretary of Defense studies the 21 st century, the brave men and women who are ready to fight today are last on the budget list.