As we mark the 9th year of this bloody war in Afghanistan, please join us in calling on Secretary Clinton to stop giving our taxdollars to the mercenary firm Blackwater. We'll never end the war in Afghanistan as long as companies like Blackwater can make a killing out of killing. Tell Hillary Clinton: Stop Doing Business with Blackwater!

Hillary Clinton, when she was on the campaign trail in 2008, pledged to cut these companies loose after Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians in Baghdad's Nisour Square. Disgusted with the violence and abuses committed by Blackwater and others, Afghan President Karzai recently banned these firms from working in Afghanistan.

So why has the US State Department continued to pour billions into contracts with private security firms? Why did a Blackwater front group called International Development Solutions just win a piece of a State Department contract worth $10 billion?

Let’s call her Jenny. Jenny was alone, and clearly confused. Her face was dotted with acne, and her short, blond hair was stiff at the ends. As the Skyline train sped towards the next destination, she stood ‘at attention’ in her military fatigue and boots staring aimlessly into the vastness of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Jenny was not the only returnee from Iraq. The airport was bustling with men and women in uniform. There seemed to be little festivity awaiting them. The scene was marred with the same confusion and uncertainty that have accompanied this war from the start: unclear goals that kept on changing while its own advocates - in the media, the government and within right-wing think tanks - began slowly and shamelessly disowning it. They all changed their tune, and many of them redirected their venom at Iran. In the meanwhile, the soldiers continued to fight, kill and fall in droves. Following the recent reduction of troops in Iraq, thousands were expected to come home, while others headed to Afghanistan to battle on, carrying with them their inconceivably heavy gear and their continued bewilderment.

Five things are certain about solar panels going back on the White House roof:

• They won't generate nuclear waste;
• They won't be targets for terrorists hoping cause an atomic holocaust;
• They'll be working many years before any new atomic reactor could be built;
• They'll deliver usable heat and electricity far more cheaply than new nuclear plants;
• They'll make the US that much freer from the oil addiction that fuels our disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The great unknown: could this solar power zap Team Obama with the courage to confront the nuclear/military madness now destroying our nation?

These new panels go far beyond what Jimmy Carter installed and then Ronald Reagan tore down. Carter's $30,000 rig was installed in 1979 to heat water, which it did.

Reagan's 1986 tear-down defined his assault on the green power industry on behalf of King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes & Gas).

We at Greenpeace marched with many others in 1991, at the launch of the first Gulf War, demanding George H.W. Bush reinstall the panels. He wouldn't.

In the 1930s, Woody Guthrie liked to write “This machine kills fascists” on his guitar. It was a period when folk musicians stood with the people against corporate greed. This is one of the reasons that folk musicians were attacked and blacklisted during the McCarthy era. But they rose again as the reporters that offered the soundtrack for the civil rights movement in the mid to late 50s. Phil Ochs told us more about what was going on in Mississippi than scholars and intellectuals.

Today, if you want to know what’s going on in the world, you want an accurate report on where injustice is being done and people are being oppressed, the best single source of news is David Rovics. I consider him one of the greatest singer-songwriters of our time. In the same way many people watch The Daily Show over the corporate for-profit news shows, Rovics albums give us a far more insightful view on what’s really going on in the world today.

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam -- Weeping while gazing around a crowded market, U.S. Vietnam War veteran William H. Kruckmeyer says he is delighted to return, for the first time, to a country he knew as horrific battlefield.

Wiping his eyes, he's dressed like a walking neon sign: a baseball cap emblazoned "Vietnam Veteran" in golden letters, and a Hawaiian-style shirt festooned with American flags and motorcycles.

Grey-bearded Mr. Kruckmeyer is also a portal into the suffering experienced by many Americans who waged war on this side of the world, and his emotional story symbolizes their often blinkered lives today -- mostly forgotten as his generation ages.

"Please call me 'Krash,' all of my friends for 30 years do," Mr. Kruckmeyer, 67, said in an interview conducted via e-mail during August and September while he traveled through Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand with his wife, and after their return home to Westminster, California.