Joe Katzman on Winds of Change documents the effect of the "Where do they get young men like this?" phenomenon. I had the same impulse as a lot of others, to answer the question. It's true that these young men come from everywhere. Many aren't even citizens yet. They earn it with their service. (If that doesn't make you feel like a piker, I don't know what would.)
But it's also true that our military makes them, which prompts me to wonder why our public schools can't turn out more like them.

My religion teaches that we existed as spirits with God the Father before we came to this earth to receive bodies and to be tested, or maybe forged is a better word, by experiences we couldn't have in that realm. We believe that we are living in the last days leading up to the second coming of Christ and that he has restored the church to the earth as he established during his mortality. We also believe that the Father has sent certain spirits into mortality strategically as leaders and prophets, and that because of the growth of evil in the earth in this time, he has reserved some of his best to be born in order to have people here who can stand against evil and defeat it. Some have called them Saturday's Warriors, but I've always viewed their role as being intelligent and strong-willed enough to stand up to the pressures of the world and its temptations. Now I'm thinking that some of them are literal warriors as well.

I've known for a long time that my sons are superior to me. What I didn't know is that a transformation has been taking place below the radar, so to speak, in our armed forces. First, we changed to an all volunteer military. What we didn't realize, however, largely because our media haven't want to cover it, was the quality of people who volunteered and the technology and training being given to them.

This war was greeted with the same old disgust and jeering that we saw during Vietnam, but this time the protestors weren't our youth, but a bunch of aging jerks who seemed even more obnoxious and arrogant than ever before. They seemed driven to alienate the rest of the nation, and when questioned individually, pretty clueless.

Then we saw direct transmissions of what our troops were doing over there, amazingly different from the kind of "coverage" we were used to, from reporters living in hotels and accompanied by Iraqi minders. Surprise, these young men and women were bright and tough and disciplined. We were impressed, and "journalists" who would submit to minders and then tell us they were giving us the truth, were shown up by the "embeds" who were with the troops, and real reporters like Michael Kelly.

The sea change is evident when we compare Peter Arnett and the whiners at Centcom, Pentagon and White House press conferences to reporters like Greg Kelly and Rick Leventhal on Fox News.

The troops are now turning up sickening evidence of the truth about Saddam's regime that the opponents of war had refused to accept. As I type this, I''m viewing reports on a warehouse with 200 corpses of victims in Basrah executed with shots throught their temples, and a room with meathooks. Something tells me that the anti-war ship is sinking. Wake up the world for the conflict of justice.

So, where do they get young people like this? I guess my answer would be that God has been sending them to us, before we knew we needed them.