I can't imagine what it must feel like right before the Christmas holidays you must ship out to Iraq. That is the overt feeling in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and there is no getting over it. Not only does death come back here, war begins here. With the largest military installation in America on her border, Fayetteville will never have the "feel" of any other city. It can't. That is because America's soldiers are trained here. We must ask ourselves why a city such as Fayetteville can't be like every other city. Do other cities' host compounds designed to train men to kill the enemy? No, and we can't fault it for that. National defense as we see today is imperative to the War on Terror. The United States spends hundreds of billions of dollars equipping the military, so the United States can be a worldpower. Do we really need to be a worldpower, or could we just be? It would save us a lot of money. The Cold War is over, but it appears other "rogue" nations are stepping up where Russia defaulted. War it seems is an unpleasant fact of life. Imagine living in a city where thousands of soldiers being prepared for war are unleashed on a weekend. There are unnecessary murders, because drunken soldiers unknowingly stumble outside a strip club at 2:00 a.m. and get rolled. Instinctively they resist and are murdered in cold blood while they are drunk. It is a disturbing thought. Not too long ago a man was out on the town with his girlfriend. A drunken soldier had called a cab, and the man pulls up in a Crowne Victoria. Thinking it was his cab because it looked like it, the soldier crawled in the back seat. The driver, afraid for his life, pulled out a gun. When they got out of the car the soldier hit the man out of fear he was going to be shot. As a result he was, in the head. Now he is a vegetable. Nonsensical violence in a violent town. The town is not pleasant, because war is near. The ground shakes with force as the howitzers rumble. You can hear machine gun fire. The constant whine of a turboprop plane is always in your ear threatening to deposit the 82nd Airborne in your backyard. During Dessert Storm Fayetteville almost went under. The soldiers it seems finance the town, and do they ever. Million dollar homes are a common site around the streets of Fayettenam. How can there be so many millionaires when there are so many poor people, so many street people?