No harm, no foul...

OK, I understand, we're at war. 9/11. The official answer to any question about anything. And I understand the importance of bending over backwards to make sure that our boys and girls in uniform have the emotional and material support that they need, no matter what one's opinion about the whole Iraqi adventure.

But I would think that, say, a F-16 fighter jet strafing a New Jersey middle school with machine gun fire would be considered undesirable, even in the context of the war on terror. I wouldn't think that this would be a controversial topic- one where you needed to consider the pros and cons.

Well, it seems that I was just being unpatriotic, according to at least one resident (and more likely, one sizeable faction) of this garden state community. Apparently, a few weeks ago, a National Guard pilot on a training mission accidently raked the roof of the Little Egg Harbor Intermediate School with a burst of live 20mm ammunition.

OK, I can understand, this could happen during a training excercise in a densely populated state like New Jersey. And thank God that it happened at night, and no one was hit. But you would expect any rational person, even the biggest hawk in the reddest state in the country, to say something like "Wow, well, let's make sure that doesn't happen again." Not really a debatable point, right?

Wrong.

According to a recent AP report, there is a growing division in the communities surrounding the gunnery range. Some folks "consider it profoundly unpatriotic to question the military during a time of war". One resident was quoted as saying "Let 'em alone; they're over there putting their lives on the line for us...That [pilot] probably feels so bad about this. He's probably going to get sent overseas and he might not even come back. As long as no one got hurt, this whole thing should just be forgotten."

Well, color me a bleeding-heart, blue-state, unpatriotic liberal, but I would prefer to actually FIGURE OUT HOW THIS HAPPENED AND MAKE SURE IT DOESN'T HAPPEN AGAIN! As opposed to just "forgetting about the whole thing". And I'll bet that all the pilots and generals and other defenders of freedom who have kids in that middle school feel the same way.

So unless Osama bin Laden has gone undercover as a New Jersey 6th grader, I'm sure that we can export democracy and free the world of terrorism without this sort of thing.