Gentlemen

I am an Australian and my son is an Australian - as far as we are concerned there is no place on God's earth better than Australia, and there are no people better than Australians.

That was until the past week or so.

My son is in the Australian Army and he is currently on deployment in Iraq I can not go into his duties in great depth, but shall we say that he and his fellow army buddies are on a glorified guard duty looking after the Australian Embassy. They don't go out looking for "action", though it is a different story in Afghanistan, there the Aussie troops chase the baddies over the hills and into the valleys.

My son and I just ended a long 'phone conversation and here are some of his comments, believe me this is what he said. We have all seen the bullsh** emails written by some clown in his lounge room pretending to be at the coal face, but this is what was said.:

From Michael Zak:

On this day in 1973, Lt. Commander John McCain was released from a North Vietnamese prison.

The missile that shot down his fighter-bomber broke both arms and a leg, and he nearly drowned after parachuting into a lake. He was then bayoneted and beaten. McCain refused his captors' demands that he divulge military information in return for medical treatment. Despite being tortured, McCain also refused offers from the communists to free him ahead of other servicemen who had been imprisoned longer.

President Richard Nixon welcomed McCain home, after five and a half years of captivity, much of that time in solitary confinement.

"Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -- Frederic Bastiat, Economist (1801-1850)