Anti-War Vet Hypocritical on Uniform

If you were watching (not the "mainstream" media) closely last week, you might have seen or heard about the radical Leftist Kos forum on undermining the United States military that was called "The Military and Progressives: Are They Really That Different?"

To summarize, near the end of this forum promoting American military impotence and defeatism, a soldier in uniform challenged the panel by trying to cite some of the progress being made in Iraq.

John Solz, one of the panelists who was a former captain not in uniform, got pretty bent out of shape (retired Gen. Wesley Clark, another panelist, did handle himself with more decorum). The main thing this former captain took issue with was the fact that the challenging soldier was in uniform; Solz believed this Sgt. David Aguina of the 733rd Maintenance Company was using his uniform for political purposes.

I've been out of the military for 12 years, so my memory of some of the regulations you didn't deal with on a daily basis is a little hazy, but I do recall something prohibiting the wear of the uniform for political purposes.

At the same time, I remembered when during the Vietnam war, John Kerry wore his uniform to Capitol Hill to badmouth and malign his country and his fellow soldiers even as they fought communists overseas.

Well, columnist Melanie Morgan now points out not only Kerry's misuse of the military uniform, but also the fact that Solz has a picture of himself in uniform on his advocacy website, VoteVets.org.

Morgan's column also says Solz was confronted by Lt Col Buzz Patterson because Solz was involved in political activism while in the reserves, a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

I guess if you're an anti-war veteran who's committed to to undermining his country's defense (like Solz and Kerry), it's okay to display your uniform. But if you're defending your fellow soldiers' successes and attempting to shore up the morale of our armed forces, that's an improper display of the uniform.