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04′ ‘, One night in Vietnam after too many beers, I got into a debate with a fellow soldier about what orders must be disobeyed. He took the “my country right or wrong” position, so I asked him what he would have done had he been born in Germany in 1920. As a young man, he would have joined the Nazi army, since that was the German army at the time, given his “any government with a quasi-legal mandate right or wrong” attitude. He said it was the duty of a citizen to follow the orders of the constituted authority: I fired my last rhetorical big gun: “What if your mother was Jewish? Would you have kept silent if you heard she was to be arrested?” Without a blink, he replied he would not have interfered, that “right is the will of the stronger,” and he wanted to be with the stronger. There he was, the perfect soldier. The alternative was too troubling. If there is a morality that supersedes legality, nationalism, and narrow religious doctrine, each person must be responsible for their own actions all of the time. How are we, as a country and a culture, any different than that drunken GI? Eastside Austin residents gather on the front lawn of Mayor Roy Butler’s house to request citizen oversight of city police. These young men asked to be placed in this segregated wing for young homosexual men in order to protect themselves. A fisherman in Havana. OCTOBER 5, 2007 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 11