How many of you out there have 16 or 17 year old boys? Do they spend the day playing various sports with their friends and the nights playing video games?
It seems like only yesterday when Zane was that age – on the weekends we continually had wall-to-wall kids as all would gather here and go downstairs to watch TV, play video games, listen to music or just act silly. The more we had the sillier they acted, especially when it was a mixture of boys and girls.
Because he was always having one of his friends spend the night we bought Zane bunk beds that had a full sized bed on the bottom and a single bed on the top. For some reason the kids thought the bunk beds were unique and invariably there would be four or five of them sitting up on the top bunk watching TV and none on the bottom.
It was a wonderful age and they had great fun with nothing more to worry about than where their next pizza was coming from.
Times have changed. I just finished reading a story in Reuters about the death of LeRon Wilson, a Queens, NY soldier that lost his life on July 6, 2007 in Iraq at the age of 18. LeRon joined the Army at age 17 and is one of the youngest U.S. soldiers to die in Iraq.
I knew 17 year olds could join the military, but I couldn’t imagine the U.S. military accepting a 16-year old into service, yet according to the Reuters story we do:
"Under U.S military recruiting rules, a person aged 16 or 17 may enlist with parental authority. But recruits cannot go into combat until they are 18 — the age established in a U.N. protocol as the minimum age for combat."
The military may call it recruitment rules, but it sounds more like child abuse to me.
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