Nicolai Brown’s Oct. 4 commentary certainly gave me pause. I appreciate that he’s got his opinion of our president and of the war in Iraq. That’s OK.

What I don’t appreciate is his attempting to say that supporting the troops is part of the problem, in that it is supposedly covering the lack of planning in Iraq.

He equates supporting the troops with some sort of hollow and meaningless thing, like dot-com ventures.

I was in Iraq from April 2003 to April 2004. You have no idea what that means to me. You have no idea what it’s like to have people trying to kill you. You have no idea what it’s like to have people die next to you.

The experience is more substantial than anything you can find on the green grass of this campus. You’ve never seen it, lived it or felt it. There is nothing I can say that can explain any of that to you.

What I want to try to explain is how people’s support gave guys like us comfort in times of need. We got letters from total strangers, telling us that we’d be in their thoughts and prayers.

We got drawings and notes from school kids. Their innocence would make us smile in times when we thought it was impossible.

I received letters from someone whom I never knew before the war. Those letters were a comfort. I recall one day I was almost killed by a roadside bomb. When I got back to my hooch, I found one of her letters waiting for me. I know it was just a piece of paper with some ink on it, but to me, it felt like a reassurance — a reassurance that someone cared and that it would all be all right.

Those of us who were there and those who are there now are more than a “dot-com venture.” We’re human beings. You have a right to your views, but please don’t try wrapping us up in your politics.

After you bashed the support of our troops, you use the numbers of our dead to show how badly things are going in Iraq. If you don’t like the idea of supporting us, don’t use our dead to make your case.

James McKnight Stanley

Freshman

Psychology