As an artillery trooper I was ALWAYS reminded that "Grunt, everything else is support."

I was a mechanized Infantry Platoon Leader. Those things have a lot of punch too.

I had a weird mix in my platoon though. I had two tanks and two Brads. Tanks will rule the day, but those Brads aren’t to be underestimated. Their 25mm will rip up a T-72 with little complaint.

You can go after all the T-72's you want.

But a lot of the Bradley crewmen I knew thought that their TOW missile gave them the ability to take on the M1 Abrams. I had to tell them that in the time it takes for you to get off one TOW shot and possibly miss, we can get off four shots, and hit each time.

Infantrymen are far under-rated for their smarts. Many think they're "dumb grunts."

I rang in the new year swearing it will be the year of indictments, impeachment, and the downfall of Emperor Heelspurs and his cowardly gang of idiots.

Like you said, dumb is far from true.

Not to pat my own back too hard, but I was a platoon leader in Iraq and I had a degree in Chemistry (they don’t give those to dumb-asses). My Platoon Sergeant had a Masters in British literature and was a local chess champ. I was far from the exception amongst my peers. I worked with a lot of guys who were both very well educated and smart.

You might not need a lot of brains to get into the Infantry, but to be successful you’ve gotta be on top of your game. Quick thinking and being sharp keeps you and your men alive. A lot of the NCOs I worked with might have been rough around the edges and didn’t have a nice piece of paper from a university like I did, but they certainly had brains.

That says a lot about a person’s character. He isn’t afraid of shit and he’ll persevere until either his job is done or he is dead.

Combat veterans on either side of the political spectrum have my utmost respect. I believe that only guys who have “been there and done that” should be allowed to send us to war. When you see combat and know what it is like to stuff a body bag of a friend, a man you killed, or the body of a child killed by your actions then you are able to make the decision to send people to war and know what it means.

Draft dodgers like trump have no idea what it means to inflict war on anyone.