My article, for those who haven't read it, detailed the grief that a young woman, Kelsey Baker, is suffering over the loss of her boyfriend, Diego Pongo, who was recently killed in a firefight in Iraq. In the article, I pointed out the lack of anger by Baker toward the U.S. government, the entity that sent Pongo to Iraq in the first place to kill or be killed. I pointed out that the reason for her lack of anger toward the federal government lies with the power of military indoctrination.

The two responses are as follows:

Response 1: I am in complete agreement with your viewpoint. However, l must admonish you on the absence of an expression of commiseration (sincere or not) for the death of a young man who implicitly trusted his elders to not deceive him as to his purpose. My sympathy to the young lady and the boy's family. I'm certain you do also just having overlooked the expressions.

Response 2: I used to believe that, but in more recent years I have come to lay the blame at the idiots or psychopaths who voluntarily sign up to serve in the US military. No one forced Pongo to join the military, or to not resign once they ordered him to Iraq. Under a system of conscription, I could see feeling sorry for him, but with an all-volunteer military, whose fault is it but his? To say "I was ordered to go" is the Nuremberg defense, isn't it?  Just as one should object to and not comply with morally heinous orders, so too with life-risking orders of manifest stupidity.

I'm always a bit skeptical about expressing personal sympathies in writing about the deaths of people I don't personally know. It seems a bit disingenuous. I felt that beginning my article with the phrase "A sad article" and describing "Baker's deep grief" was sufficient to express my empathy with the deep pain that accompanies the death of any loved one. Since I don't know Baker personally and didn't know Pongo or his family and since the likelihood that they would ever read my article was close to nil, it seemed sort of disingenuous for me to send them "my sincerest condolences" in the body of my article.

The second response raises some very deep and profound issues though.