Quote Originally Posted by rsteinmetz70112 View Post
This is were I have an issue. I have several uncles (all now deceased) who served in WWII. My father (also deceased) climbed into a B-17 and flew 35 missions over Europe. My brother served 30 years in the USAF, retiring as a Full Colonel. I never served as there was this Vietnam thing I (and my father) disagreed with, but I declined an Academy appointment and acted against that war.

There is a famous picture of an East German Border Guard jumping the barricades for freedom during the cold war.

There was no celebration of Hitler's death that I know of. There was a celebration of the end of the war. We aren't there yet.
I'm thinking there was probably some celebration at the word of Hitler's death.

I have so many family and friends who felt the exact same way about the Vietnam war. The sad thing about that was there was never even a real "Mission Accomplished" It should have been a great lesson on the difficulty of guerilla warfare, but sadly it's had some of the same mistakes repeated this time around.

I think with the difference in the type of war we are fighting here Bin Laden's death IS a celebratory marker for some. We never will "win" this war. This is basically an ongoing campaign, similar to the columbian drug trade and our continuing "war" on drugs. It's too nebulous to have a definitive end. In the majority of people's minds this man himself might as well have killed those people that day. He's messianic to his follows, they are an extension of him. When we went to war, his ideology was what we were fighting. So to see him dead, in a lot of folks minds, is the biggest victory we'll get to see for some time.