Erm Gunman, I don't know if you know this, but in the Artists Pallet threads, the idea is to put drawings in and not ramble with ramdom words which mean absoutely nothing.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

I'm guessing this is Gunman's version of a Haiku

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Putting the "Con" in Condor....Ooooo... shiny red button!

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It is the tiny spark of humanity that adds blaze to a villain

I lived in a town which has a huge an army base just outside of it... I have some respect for what they have to do to get into the military. When I was 16 I looked into it.

Gunnie get with the times! Go and apply or ask a real marine about it. They generally won't glorify war.

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Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up- Pablo Picasso.

In the British Army, you can join at 16 but can go to the frontline at 18.

War isn't cool like in movies but real and the mental stress can be really hard. In the First World War, soldiers were shot and named as cowards because the mental stress that those soldiers in the trenches were under uasn't really understood.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker

My brother joined the Canadian Air Force when he was 18, in 1983. He's a Major now, and he'll be starting a 9 month stint in Afghanistan very soon. I'm not too worried about him though, as he will be spending all his time at a base in Kandahar. My step-brother, however, is in the Canadian Army, and he's going over there too, and he might be doing patrols...

Well, we could send him my FIL and MIL's nightmares. They started in Romania. Opa didn't get enough time to hide the third time they came to his village for volunteers. Oma and her sisters moved from relative to relative, just ahead of the front, and stayed in Austria while the front passed. Her sister didn't return home one day. At 16 she helped deliver a baby by candle-light in a bomb shelter during a raid; the only other adult was a blind grandmother. They saw enough that they're glad the Allieds won, but they also saw a lot the Allieds did that didn't make it into the history books.

I am incredibly grateful to those who serve their country. There are times when the less violent methods just don't work.

I also wish the news would focus on all the non-violent good our troops are doing. They are building schools and allowing girls to go to them. They are providing clean water and food. They are removing land mines. That is why we need to be there, to support the civilians, so they can make an informed and free choice of leaders. The goal is to help the civilians (including drafted soldiers), not kill the bad guys.

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Between stimulus and response there is a space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

- Viktor E. Frankl

Living in North America, it's too easy to forget what it's like to have to live through a war, unless we're reminded by people who have actually done it. My boyfriend's mother and her family were deported from Poland in 1939 by the Soviets and ended up in a gulag in Siberia. A few years later, when the Soviets and the Germans were at war, the Polish prisoners were released from the gulags, but they had to walk all the way down to the Persian Gulf. My boyfriend's uncles and grandfather then joined the British army and his grandmother, aunt and mother went to a refugee camp in Pakistan until the war ended.

I'm very proud of my brother, and step-brother. They've already been to Somalia, Bosnia, Eritrea and Haiti, and now Afghanistan.

My brother told me that for his pre-Afghanistan training, he had to be able to lift a 200 pound man with 30 pounds of gear and then carry him 100 metres in less than 60 seconds -and he did it.

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Eagle in Residence
Tempory Frisker