I try to bring a lunch to work every day, I really do. A turkey sandwich, yogurt, an apple juice, couple cookies. Sometimes, though, I get disorganized and end up going to a fast-food place. Burger — ketchup only — and fries.

Not this week. When I read fast-food workers were going to strike for better wages, I figured the local PuckBurger emporium could do without my skinny nickels for a while.

Maybe a long while.

We still have people over there in Afghanistan, and it looks like we're going to send some more to Syria.

I support the fast-food workers action on behalf of the men and women fighting overseas, some of whom will, if my experience means anything, come back to America and work for slave wages at McSnout's, home of the all-snout burger.

Like everyone else in America, I believe any one in any kind of uniform is a hero, hero, hero — except postal workers. They are, after all, just lazy, unionized parasites.

So when the boys and girls come home, I want them to make enough money to eat regularly.

I know it makes me a mushy, sentimental old Communist, but I'm funny about those brave warriors who defend our nation wherever the next big lie takes them. Why, if it wasn't for the 100,000 civilian dead in Iraq, I might be forced to wear a turban and someone would probably have taken my gun.

I have friends who've been deployed four times or so in the last 10 years. The ones who are cops and firefighters are doing well enough, but many of the guys who joined young spend their time in between deployments drinking, waiting for the buzzing in their head to stop and searching for employment way down at the hairnet end of the economy, where they feel foolish because they used to be heroes and will be again.

I love our brave warriors and, if the biggest employers in this country are fast-food joints and big-barn retailers full of fall-apart crap made in China, then I say our hero warriors should be able to make some kind of a living running the fryolator and stocking the shelves.

In this decade, the United States of America has excelled in the creation and export of one product and one product only — death. As a nation, we can't get jobs into Detroit, but we can wipe out whole villages along the Euphrates River.

The guys at the top, they've got blood on their hands. The guys at the bottom, the tired heroes in camouflage, they just went where they were sent and did what they were told. Over and over and over.

And they gotta come back, if only for a little while, till the next adventure. And some of 'em, they don't have a lot of transferable skills.

And if you don't work, you're a bum, even if you just got back from Afghanistan. And if you don't make much money, you're a loser, even if you still smell like MREs.

So, I won't eat fast food. Not until our brave heroes can get at least a $12 an hour job between armed mistakes.

Find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists at www.creators.com