Recently, I sang a song at the Court Street Baptist Church in Auburn that I had written and recorded. I wrote “The Wisdom That We Gained” five years after I returned home from spending 30 months in Vietnam. I informed the congregation that it might be the last time I sing the song as the closing words of the song are “Our kids must never see a Vietnam.”

To me, as it stands right now, the terms, “insurgents” and “Viet Cong,” are one and the same. Soldiers don’t know where they’re all coming from, their numbers are endless, and they all have the readiness to die in order to kill. Perhaps they have no weapons of mass destruction, but they do have enough guns and ammunition to shoot at Americans for many years.

My point is that if President Bush gets lucky and we do liberate Iraq, will that oil-rich nation pay the billions and billions of dollars it will cost to pay for physical and mental care of their liberators, we Americans, or will it be our children’s responsibility?

Al Pelletier, Norway