---

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 12, 1993                   TAG: 9304120248
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

---

GLORIFYING THE GORINESS OF WAR

GREG Schneider's March 16 story on William "Ironman" Lee ("Revered Marine finds poverty in past") was both shameless and appalling. My question is which is worse, Lee's violence or Schneider's glorification of it?

We presumably are to admire a man who relishes killing other human beings above all else. I see no patriotism or heroism in Lee's violence. He glories in having impaled another person to a wall with a bayonet. He "hated like the devil" missing the chance to slaughter Iraqis. Lee would do better to hang pictures of the families of the men he killed on his wall.

Schneider, on the other hand, has apparently seen too many war movies. At best, war is a necessary hell. At worst, it is immoral and barbaric. Schneider's labeling the people Lee killed as "bandits" and "marauding Indians" is a disgraceful way to pretend that they weren't really human beings. In addition, the Marines were in Nicaragua not to look like Indiana Jones but as an occupying army to repress peasant and labor groups fighting for economic change (Schneider's "bandits").

Perhaps both Lee and Schneider should read David Branco's column on the My Lai massacre from the same day. As Branco stated, " . . . ordinary men are capable of committing and sometimes do commit unimaginably atrocious acts." We need models of compassion and justice for our children, not ones who glory in the number of scalps they have collected. JON NAFZIGER FAIRFIELD

---