Chickenhawk…chicken shit.

I don’t always agree with Jonah Goldberg (for one thing I think he shoots from the hip far too often, and makes a hash of his arguments when he does, but then, he’s the son of his parents), but this business of the left labelling him as a chickenhawk because he never served is a load of total chicken shit.
I never served either. I was scared to death in my teens that I was going to be drafted at 18 and sent to Vietnam. But I would have gone, if for no other reason than I had far too much respect for my decorated veteran father to take the tail-between-legs route out and run to Canada. Thankfully the draft ended, and thankfully (if not providentially) we left Vietnam. And when registration for Selective Service started up again when I was in high school (or maybe it was not long after I graduated, I can’t remember now), I was exactly 34 days too old to be required to register.
That being said, at 20 I came very close to enlisting of my own free will in the Navy. I was unemployed and had dropped out of college, and I had a great role model in a cousin of mine who was, at the time, a lieutenant commander stationed in San Diego. I only backed out at the last minute because I wasn’t sure if I was really suited for the regimentation of military life.
I never really thought about military service again until 9/11. At that time I was 41 years old and looking forward to my first wedding anniversary in less than a week. Yet my wife will attest that I spent some time on the Internet trying to find out if I could enlist in SOMETHING. Alas, at 41 (and given my then-current physical condition), nobody seemed to want me. (I’ve since found out that I could have joined the Guard in some sort of rear-echelon capacity. But now, at 45 and given physical issues — although I’ve lost weight! — that have gotten worse since 9/11, that doesn’t really appeal to me.)
I suppose I could be called a chickenhawk for my support of the war. But you’d better be ready to duel it out at 10 paces with my choice of weapons if you do. Any takers? (The fewer lefty assholes on this planet, the better, I say.)
And I suspect that’s the way Jonah feels too, but he’s not in a position to say so.
[Later thought: My choice of weapons might surprise you.]