Look at the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It went on for years, produced no decisive outcome, and killed at least a million people. Now, look at the Gulf War. It was over in a few weeks, had the planned outcome (Iraq forced out of Kuwait), and far fewer casualties, some 220 for us and 200,000 of them.

I came down so hard on your post because I've actually read where some idiots have said what you did and _meant_ it. Of course, most of them are armchair Rambos living out their "Sgt. Rock" comic book fantasies.

My Uncle, Paul Miller, was on the receiving end of a human wave assault in the Korean War before being captured. He described what happened once. It was about the only time I ever heard him discuss the war. It was in 1974 and we were having a family get together the night before a cousin went off to the military.

As he told it, thousands of North Koreans were on one side of a river and a couple hundred Americans were on the other. The Koreans tried to overwhelm the Americans by sheer force of numbers. The Americans turned every weapon they had against the Koreans, including cannons and quad 0.50 caliber antiaircraft guns. He described how every time the cannon fired, it cleared a path through the crowd for a couple seconds before the gap refilled with more people. The battle went on and on until they finally ran out of Koreans. I could see in my uncle's face that he was reliving the experience as he told the story. He ended by saying, "The river flowed red that day", shook his head, and hasn't spoken about it since.

Not too long after this incident, his medical unit was overran when the Chinese entered the war. Only the courage of a Marine Corsair pilot saved him from immediate execution. The Marine saw that my uncle and his battalion surgeon was about to be executed and started straffing the area. The surgeon told one of the enemy soldiers, "You see that plane up there? He's a friend of mine. If you kill me, he's going to drop napalm on you." Both men survived that day and went on to survive 2 1/2 years as POWs. I never knew that story until NBC News did a "Profiles in Courage" segment a few years ago. The Marine pilot and the surgeon met accidentally after the war and became good friends. Uncle Paul also met the Marine a few years later. The story used to be on the MSNBC website but I guess they cleared out the older stories to free up disk space.