When we start paying our enlisted men and women, especially those at the pointy edge of the spear maybe this will be a little less disconcerting. Watching supposedly "American" companies and individuals prey on those who are in many ways highly vulnerable makes me sick.

Nicholas Stachler was 19 years old when he reported for basic training with the Army at Fort Benning, Ga., before shipping out for 11 months to Iraq.

A gentle, trusting man, he had only weeks earlier graduated from high school with a handful of trophies in hockey and soccer, middling grades and hardly a clue about how to handle his money. He had held only casual jobs baby-sitting and mowing lawns and had never opened a checking account. The bus trip to boot camp, from the foothills of the Appalachians in southern Ohio to the kudzu-covered fields of western Georgia, took him farther from home than he had ever been.

About six weeks into his training - six weeks of combat drills and drummed-in lessons in Army ways - he tasted one of the less-honorable traditions of military life: a compulsory classroom briefing on personal finance that was a life insurance sales pitch in disguise.

Every serviceperson has access to some good, solid financial advice and services from companies like USAA, if they're eligible to join, or military credit unions, like Navy Federal and Pentagon Federal; they offer financial products that will meet the needs of service members and their families and they don't have to resort to 'interesting' practices to get business. Dollars to Donuts GEN Zinni is a member of both USAA and Navy Federal...

The solution to this is to pressure the congressCriminals to tighten up the laws and put some teeth into enforcement oversight against these predators. No E-4 should be buying financial products it takes an MBA to decipher and then losing their ass in the process while they are facing combat...why not just start selling them derivatives or something? It seems that these "salesmen" took advantage of a system that's badly in need of repair, to the detriment, it seems to me, of Good Order and Discipline...