True pacifism, and the willingness to accept the consequences, isn't gutless. Many of the men who served in WWII as medics and stretcher bearers were conscientious objectors. They refused to kill, but they didn't refuse to serve. They were some of the bravest men on any battlefield. Others did refuse to serve and accepted jail time. That too took a lot of courage. I met a man back in 1978 who had owned a light aircraft company prior to WWII. Rather than compromise on his pacifism, he sold his company rather than making planes for military use. That probably cost him millions, but he held firm to his beliefs. That took guts.

My parents' generation knew that there were things more important than their own individual lives. This sentiment was perhaps best captured by none other than the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., when he said, "If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live." A brave man, MLK lived and died by those words.

Fortunately, people serving in the military today still know this is true. Even in peacetime, military service is dangerous. According to some statistics I've seen, some 1,000 military personnel are killed in accidents each year, although I don't know if this includes things like auto accidents off base. Planes crash, vehicles roll over, there are weapons and explosives accidents, and all sorts of unpleasant things that happen all too often. I saw this firsthand back in 1977 when an officer from my unit was killed during a training jump and 15 others from my plane were injured. It was a bad day. Excrement occurs.

There was a time when people who screwed up doing something stupid accepted the consequences in silence. Today, they're likely to hire a lawyer and blame someone else for their actions. To me, that's gutless.

Back in 1993, Army Ranger and Delta Force personnel fought a pitched battle in Somalia. They killed hundreds of the enemy with a loss of 18 of their own. Clinton withdrew the forces from Somalia, a monumentally gutless decision that emboldened men like Osama bin Laden into believing that Americans were weak. We're likely to pay for that 1993 gutlessness for a long time to come.