Each Saturday morning between 10 and 11, protesters against President George W. Bush's preemptive invasion of Iraq gather at Downtown Easton Pennsylvania's historic Centre Square.

There they huddle beneath the annual Yuletide season Peace Candle.  Recently resurrected by workers from its flaccid state of repose at the city's Bushkill Drive storage yard for its yearly erection, the edifice that failed to make it into the Guinness Book of Records as the world's largest candle - disqualified because it's constructed of plywood and papier-mâché, not wax - rises above Centre Square, more a phallic symbol of American male hubris and Pax Americana than it is the totem to a threatened world peace.

Huddled with the protesters last Saturday was www.billybytes.com website and newsletter writer Billy Givens, a veteran of the Korean Conflict and one who is proud that the Soldiers' and Sailors' monument includes a bas relief of the Civil War battle in the bay of Mobile, Alabama, where 71 years ago Givens was born into and grew up under the shadow of a Jim Crow apartheid.

(The 2000 U. S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore divided the country between red and blue states in a schism not seen since the Dred Scott Decision of 1857 that split the country over the 11 Southern slave states and the equal number of free states of the North. History will be harsh to the William Rehnquist court for its divisive decision in Bush v. Gore, just as it has been in the Dred Scott Decision of Chief Justice Roger Toney nearly a century and a half ago.)

On the opposite side of the monument and its naval battle tableau, a man walking his rottweiler approached the protesters.  With the vehemence of a Vietnam swiftboat veteran of the John O'Neill stripe, he launched into an attack on the patriotism of fellow Viet Nam veteran and comrade-in-arms John Kerry, continuing to kick the senator when he was down from his loss at the hands of Karl Rove and Ohio's Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell who threw countless ballots into his round file because they were cast on less than 80-weight-grade paper stock - and in Florida, of the Diebold touchscreen voting machines that produce no auditable paper trail, a clear violation of the U. S. Constitution guaranteeing the right of voting recounts.

Though Givens is not a veteran of Viet Nam, his service-connected disabilities inflicted by Korea resulted, even many years later, in his medical referral to a therapy group of Viet Nam War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Once or twice a month, at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lyons, New Jersey, in therapy sessions conducted by psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, and social workers, Givens looked into the haunted eyes and souls of his fellow veterans, suffering the torments of PTSD flashbacks, and listened heartbroken to their plaintive cries for succor, understanding, and peace.

So when the man, protected by his rottweiler, launched into his barrage of vitriol and slander against Kerry, Givens, in a PTSD flashback of his own, saw red, as scarlet as Bush's crimson states, and contemplated kicking the slanderer's ass all the way around Centre Square.

In the heat of the exchange, Givens learned that his adversary, with a 4-F draft classification exempting him from induction into the military, does have a soldier son now serving in Iraq. Through that son, the father can experience, however vicariously, a hard-on for the hordes of innocent Iraqis - especially the women, children, and infants of that war-ravaged state.

God bless America!