Submitted by Maury Leon, Dec 22, 2006 09:33

It is a sad day for Americans when U.S. Marines are charged with murdering civilians in a combat area. Our military is out there to protect us by defeating our enemy. A lot of things happen in the heat of the battlefield. Our enemies make every house and every road and every field the battlefield. In Iraq, the enemy are everywhere, can be anyone, man, woman, child. Who knows? Iraq is more visible battlefield than Lebanon or Israel or Ethiopia. Even the U.S. is a war zone; at least lower Manhattan around what was the World Trade Center was a war zone. Our airports are 'war zones' with increased degrees of security from entering a terminal to boarding a plane. That is a fact of the Twenty-first century and we best understand it. It's hard to get our mind around the fact that we, like the few Iraqi ‘civilians' – no one in this world is not safe from harm's way. In a highten state of war, in combat on a foreign land where deception and subtrafuge reign, fewer 'chances' are taken.

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