Sadly, as I read this thread it's hard for some as it's been over time to separate the soldier from the politics that send the soldier to War. In all Wars be it a declared one, or one that is simply called a police action, I can assure you, when you are the one being shot at, you make no such distinction. While it's true in War, that there are those that carry out atrocities, from the Gremans at Malmedy, to the Christian Crusaders at Jerusalem, to Lt. Calley in Vietnam, to Mao in China, to the Spartans who were wiped out by Xrexes at Thermopylae and on and on throughout human history. To blame the soldier,sailor,airman, and marine for the actions of a few much less, the actions of the Govts. that send them into battle and deny them the simple pleasures of home based on that perception is to take a very narrow minded view of the world and to take the easy way out when it comes to trying to find real answers to peace.
There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death again and again before we reach the mountaintop of our desires.
Nelson Mandela
I frankly find it shameful that someone would look back into history to a War like WW2 and judge the actions of the United States at the end of that War on a barbaric empire to somehow justify the actions of young men and women today. I will take up the challenge of defending the United States during WW2 and will start here,
The Bataan Death March (Batān Shi no Kōshin (バターン死の行進?)) was the forcible transfer, by the Imperial Japanese Army, of 75,000 American and Filipino prisoners of war after the three-month Battle of Bataan in the Philippines during World War II, which resulted in the deaths of thousands of prisoners.
Bataan Death March - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised.
The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers—and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4% chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30%
Japanese war crimes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
YES War is a terrible thing , anyone who has ever served in combat will tell you that, however when you call into question those that take up the task of defending the nation in which they live, and often times even other nations as well, you bring dishonor on yourself the nation in which you live and most of all the young men and women who fight to defend it, most of whom would just rather you say nothing if you do not have the ability to say thank you, and most of the time thats not even expected. I will leave you with this..
The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France is located on the site of the temporary American St. Laurent Cemetery, established by the U.S. First Army on June 8, 1944 and the first American cemetery on European soil in World War II. The cemetery site, at the north end of its ½ mile access road, covers 172.5 acres and contains the graves of
9,387 of our military dead, most of whom lost their lives in the D-Day landings and ensuing operations. On the Walls of the Missing in a semicircular garden on the east side of the memorial are inscribed 1,557 names. Rosettes mark the names of those since recovered and identified.
American Battle Monuments Commission
They never came home to their homes and are where they fell and died not only defending this nation but died returning the ground in which the fell to it's rightful owner's and brought back peace to them with their lives, so do not judge people like this, if you do not have the ability to send a care package or do not even want to as they do the work that most choose not to do.
I prefer to tell people to 'go forth, increase and multiply'. Has more class. 
