Electrolite reminds us what war, even the short, sweet Gulf War, is like. Click through to the pictures.

I have a friend who knows something about this upcoming war and the people who will be asked to fight it. He's Republican and conservative (unlike those deficit-doves down in DC). He served in the Marines during the Gulf War, leading ground troops. He saw that raw and bloody combat, he stood over those corpses himself trying to look calm and cool and collected. He's a pacifist.

His war, he feels, was a good one, a just one, one worth fighting and one worth, because it is always a risk in war, dying in. But he sets the bar very, very high for military action now. He knows the men and women who will go when the politicians send them, the men and women who will die and who will kill. He knows the price they all pay, the price even the ones who return from the battlefield pay. He knows war and most of you don't. He's been against this one for longer than anyone else I know.

MaxSpeak has a new quote up top: "The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry." [Bill Mauldin]