A Letter from Ten Years Ago (Victims of War)

This (slightly edited) letter was published in the Idaho Statesman ten years ago on Feb. 1999. It would be nice if it were no longer relevant.

Ninety percent of the victims of the 200 wars which have been fought on this planet since World War 2 have been civilians. When a person joins the military of any country today, he or she is joining to learn how to kill women, children, and other civilians. Killing civilians is primarily what soldiers at war do nowadays.
In the past Idaho land has been used to train soldiers to kill civilians.
Most of the 1.5 million victims (including 750,000 children) of the 1991 US attack on Iraq, which included soldiers trained on Idaho land, have been civilians.
Expanding the bombing range is a moral and spiritual tragedy for Idaho. Using good Idaho earth for the profane, sacreligious, and shameful purpose of training soldiers to kill children and other civilians in foreign countries not only desecrates our Earth and the environment, it also devastates our moral and spiritual existence.

Leonard Nolt