They were the losers!

When two airliners struck the World Trade Center's twin towers on 9/11, and another hit the Pentagon and a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania, my students acted with shock then with determination to tell the story and report how students at Appalachian State University were affected.

One wonders, though, how many finally joined a branch of the armed services to serve either in Afghanistan or Iraq. For some of the male students, their testosterone-laden bodies were ready to fight, or so it seemed at the time. Calls were made for us to strike back. To send troops to the mountains of Afghanistan to track down Osama bin Laden and to kill him.

One thing has not changed, however. The faces of our airmen, soldiers, sailors, and marines have not changed since the 1960s. While there was a draft in the sixties, it only snared the young men from working class backgrounds. The likelihood that anyone from an upper crust background getting called up in the draft were slim, pretty slim, hell, almost impossible.

Today, the soldiers and marines who are doing the dying in our two wars look a lot like they did in Vietnam. These are the young people who attend second- or third-rate high schools. And even then they are the students the cream of those schools labeled as the "Losers" with a capital L. They are the students one identifies as not going on to college, or who has to work to help the family, not just help pay for the Jeep in the driveway.

How interesting it is that when it comes to dying for our country, it seems that only those we label as losers are the ones willing to join and serve. Makes one wonder just what is worth saving in our country.