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Every now and then, I read or hear something that just stops me dead in my tracks. Sometimes I break out in laughter, sometimes I scream out in anguish, and sometimes I break down and feel like crying.

On rare occasions, I find myself with all those reactions. On very rare occasions, those reactions are almost lost in a cacophony of a multitude of rapid-fire involuntary reactions that include pride, relief, anger, frustration, motivation, inspiration and blatant disbelief. An article in The Denver Post on Feb. 24 that the U.S. military does not know the citizenship status of 16,031 active-duty military personnel provided me with my latest "very rare occasion."

In a recent article ("The Illegal Immigration Threat," DefenseWatch, Jan. 14, 2004), I talked about a 19-year old illegal alien who used a bogus green card to enlist in the Army, and how the Army was going to help facilitate getting him citizen status. (The Army's efforts did result in that soldier being sworn in as a U.S. citizen.) Little did I know at the time that that soldier was literally just the latest tip on a monolithic iceberg.

Let me share with you excerpts from the Denver Post article and my varied reactions to them:

The Denver Post article reported:

"[T]he citizenship of 16,031 members of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines is listed as 'unknown.' That's about one in 100 active-duty military members who might be U.S. citizens, legal immigrants - or just about anybody else."

Reaction: I am stunned, completely dumbfounded. I do not know what is worse: the fact that we have so many "unknowns" serving, or that they are serving despite the fact that we apparently have reasonably accurate statistics about them.

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I don't know what to make of it, there are other links in that article that I haven't yet followed, but...you see where I'm going.