I have been doing a lot of thinking about what happened on our shores. My first thoughts were that it had finally happened. I am a child of the 50's and 60's and an Air Force brat. My father was in WWII, Korea and Vietnam. I almost made it to Nam myself but the Air Force thought I couldn't lift anything heavy ( they were wrong). I lost only one guy in Nam that I knew but many other people came back really screwed up. At the time, I didn't think anything strange about going to war and getting killed. I remember a bunch of us hanging out in the high school cafeteria and deciding what branch of the service we were going to join because of the Bay Of Pigs fiasco.

What happened on the 11th is wrong, dead wrong, and there is no excuse for it. But lining up our young people to go off to war? Come on — war with whom? Some dude with a beard and too much money? He could hold up forever in the Far East and we would never find him. Who the hell are we going to war with? What country?

That's it for now, except for one final statement. When they closed the Quabbin Reservoir last week, I thought it was to protect the dam. I never thought about poison. If the dam was bombed, there goes a big hunk of this part of the world, and that couldn't be stopped like poison could.

Bob Mantler — Franklin County  

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