This was first brought to my attention at the Adopt A Platoon website. Ben Stein used to write a column called Monday Night at Morton’s. In his last column, titled “How Can Someone Who Lives In Insane Luxury Be A Star Today?” he makes many important points. My favorite was this:

“Real stars are not riding around in the backs of limousines or in Porsches or getting trained in yoga or Pilates and eating only raw fruit while they have Vietnamese girls do their nails. They can be interesting, nice people, but they are not heroes to me any longer.

A real star is the soldier of the 4th Infantry Division who poked his head into a hole on a farm near Tikrit, Iraq. He could have been met by a bomb or a hail of AK-47 bullets. Instead, he faced an abject Saddam Hussein and the gratitude of all of the decent people of the world.”

You can read the entire column here.