It's all about this great freedom we enjoy here, the freedom of speech. It's a freedom worth defending, and over the years a lot of people have defended it in a lot of different ways, some on the battlefield and others on the protest lines, in the courts and in jail cells.

I'm talking about the reaction of a few people to some photos that were published in this paper last week.

The spread featured some shots of a Marine helicopter and its crew at a student career day event at Gayman Elementary School in Plumstead.

I was attracted to the photos, which bore the headline "Send in the Marines." I thought how excited and interested I would have been as a kid to see a huge CH-53 land outside my school. It's something that doesn't happen every school day.

And I thought about how educational it would have been to go aboard the aircraft and talk to the crew about how it worked and what it was used for.

On another level I was, of course, interested because I'd done a hitch as a Marine helicopter crew chief a long time ago. So if you want to say I'm biased, go ahead. It's one of your freedoms as an American.

But a few readers had different opinions about the helicopter incident.

In essence, they believed that representatives of the military shouldn't be allowed to attend career days at public schools.

One reader said she was "appalled" and "ashamed that our educational system is promoting war and teaching small children that killing and being killed is acceptable and glamorous."

What these readers are implying is that the military should be denigrated because its members are sometimes required to wage war. Well, that's its purpose. And, yes, war is bad, and nobody despises the veil of war more than the warrior.

But to my knowledge, the American military has never started a war. Civilians start wars. It's the military's duty to end them, even when it doesn't necessarily agree with the purpose.

Some people cling to a naive belief that, if we dismantled the military, all of a sudden conflicts would just disappear and our enemies would cease to be.

You might think we're living out the lyrics of some wistful John Lennon song, and that if we'd only give peace a chance, we could all hold hands, love each other to death and skip blindly along our merry, flower-strewn way.

Well, to a certain extent, we can do all those things to a greater degree than many people in the world can.

And a major reason we can is due to the preparedness of our armed forces.

I think every kid should learn that lesson.