When are we going to smarten up and bring our troops home?

First, I understand your grief and this is not an attack on you, but please vent somewhere else or instead of venting, do something about it. By that I mean, every member of the military and their family should by now understand the sacrifice of being in the military....regardless of what they do. Yes some will die, that is just a fact. If not this war, some other war, but it WILL happen. As long as there are people that do not like us and we have a military, it will happen. GET OVER IT! It's what we do!

Instead, how about voting for people, not because they have pretty sound bites, but because they actually have some sense of what they will be responsible for when elected. By that I mean, people who either have been or have family members who have served or are serving in the military. I don't mean serving in some cushy JAG office either. I mean people who have actually suffered. Maybe then, they would make better decisions about where and when to put our folks in harms way and support them better when they do.

If you haven't noticed, the fewer people we have in Congress with a military background, the more conflicts we seem to become involved in and have a hard time getting out....all the way back 1950. Since people were so "tired" of war then they decided not to elect folks who had served because the thought then was that those folks were warmongers. In truth, those folks who served were the ones least likely to get us involved or upset sensitivities around the world (since they had been there) to cause someone to attack us in the first place.

So, something you CAN do is pay attention to who runs for ANY office, but not to their words...to their past deeds and see if you really want them representing you. To be honest, the President is only as important as a figurative representation of the country. The true power is in Congress. So, while the President may get the blame, it is Congress that approves any action...from budget and spending...which controls how long we are anywhere...to policy such as DADT. So next time you go to the polls, don't worry about who is the President. Worry about who controls the President. Think about it. Just how many of those jokers have actually visited the troops in the war zone?

Well damn, it's not like Obama doesn't have a good reason to keep a few soldiers there, training the Afghan military. Maybe it would be a good a idea to get everyone home right now tonight but we aren't just going to leave them basically defenseless. "OK we are done here, have fun with the Taliban!" Would you do that? (Don't take that personally) This is just my theory but, Pretend we leave... Afghans have maybe some kind of military, untrained, under equipped... then the terrorists come back and take some more innocent lives. Even more efficiently since the security was horrible. 'Genocide in the middle east' "well at least we weren't the ones dying!" Kinda selfish? I'm probably overly harsh here but hey, I wrote what I wrote. Our opinions are our own.

I'm sorry but I have to go with Miama's reaction. You are a military mom, have a husband injured from a previous war, have friends of your child that have seen the horrors... Well guess what... My ex-husband is a Captain in the Coast Guard, he has earned a Bronze Star for his work in Iraq for a year, he has worked his way up from E-1 to O-6 in a long, illustrious, sometimes dangerous career in the military. Our son is now in the Coast Guard. He has been to 11 foreign countries and has repatriated hundreds of foreigners back to their home countries, stopped drug runners to the tune of 7.5 TONS of cocaine with the threat of those drug runners firing on him and his shipmates. He has earned a couple of accommodations already in his short career time.

I had his best friend call me at 4 in the morning from Kandahar just because he wanted to say hi to us. Do you know how fast my heart sank hearing his voice at that hour of the morning? Same friend, we got a call he was at 29 Palms recovering from an IED explosion, he didn't want to talk about it, he just wanted to say he loved us. This is a 22 year old kid that has Purple Hearts already. The 3rd friend in their little Musketeer group is a Corpsman in the Navy on a hospital ship. While he probably won't get injured, I know the horrors he sees.

How dare you say put gang bangers and punks in those jobs to possibly cause more loss of life because they are too stupid, too arrogant or have reckless disregard for their own lives, nevermind that of their fellow service members. I want the best, the brightest, the most well trained men and women in the military protecting me and each other. Not some jerk that will knock over a 7-11 for a few bucks or just shoot aimlessly into a crowd because someone is wearing the wrong color shirt.

I have cried, too. Don't make mothers shed more tears because you want someone unworthy of being a military member to step up. That is a foolish statement.

It would be beyond foolish to think gangbangers and "punks" would be able to do something as honorable as serving our military. I understand you are grieving, but through your grief you are advocating bad policy.

You are goofy even during peace time, we have peacekeeping missions, the military deploys all the time dude!

Well, surely that's in the works (?) as Obama promised to

withdraw the troops and bring them home (and that was

2 1/2 years ago). Another promise broken?

When corrupt politics and the media stop ruling this blind country!