There are few enough people who having a direct experience of battle ever wish to return to it - or see it inflicted on their children. I've been priviledged to have one or two as close friends. Most of the politicians of the 1930s were men who had had that direct experience. It lived on in their minds informing most of their decisions. They weren't fools about Hitler or the other dictators, they simply felt that anything was better than war. And that position led inevitably to the next, much, much more terrible one. The vivid memory of this makes people of my generation (born 1929) look on the pacifism of the baby boomers with grave misgiving. One of the many reasons Clinton is despised in Europe is reflected in his soubriquet The Draft Dodger. That squalid quasi-pragmatism of his that slides away into lying, evasion & smarming is the same one that slid away to a place of safety when his less favoured peers were dying - as it seemed perfectly validly then & perhaps still - to fight tyrrany. We're left in the West with a so-called leader who has simply never developed the internal organs for making the hard decisions that might have to put necks on blocks - especially his own. But another thing. Those same men of my acquaintance who came through combat all looked on `dedicated pacifists' with a gentle contempt. Not so much because of their principles but because, having missed the most terrible but also most intense, most ineffable experience that life offers, they had been left only half-men. ALL of us who missed that lesson are half-men compared with those who have had their priorities clarified by living minute to minute with the possibility, or likelihood, of immediate dissolution. I personally have little doubt that the creation of Holden & the Glasses & the rest of them would not haved been possible but for the experiences of Sergeant X. Scottie B.