Letter said more about its author than its target

In defense of rational thinking, I feel obligated to write a response to the irrational and ignorant letter you published from Mr. Scott McGregor. Mr. McGregor was responding to a well thought out condolence letter written by Douglas Crocket.

Since everything Mr. Crocket said regarding the current war in Iraq was entirely factual, Mr. McGregor is reduced to ignorant insults as a response.

Mr. McGregor makes no attempt to refute the reality of the earlier letter, only to impugn the character of Mr. Crocket.

As his inspiration, he refers to some infamous radical rightwing fanatics who have never made any attempt to use facts themselves, or to serve in the military for that matter.

Mr. McGregor does not reveal any of his military or academic credentials, but I am happy to do so. I am a former U.S. Army paratrooper, and decorated Vietnam War veteran. Perhaps if we had more people like Mr. Crocket thinking rationally at the early stages of the Vietnam War, tens of thousands fewer young American lives and hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilian lives would not have been wasted.

While valiant young Americans are dying by the thousand in Iraq, Iraqi civilians are dying by the hundreds of thousands. We have only succeeded in tearing a nonthreatening nation apart in an attempt to satiate the personal greed of our commander in chief and his cronies.

To paraphrase an old saying from the Vietnam era: "We are going to free Iraq, even if we have to kill every last Iraqi."

Unfortunately, Mr. McGregor illustrates a substantial problem with our educational system. Obviously, too few people are being taught basic critical thinking skills. David R. Beckstead Westlake Village

Editor's note: McGregor identified himself as a veteran at the end of his letter, but it was not printed in the paper.