Hey folks,
It's been a long while since I have posted to the blog. There are a couple of reasons: 1) I was ramping up for mid-tour leave at the end of October and things were just too busy for me to post; 2) When I was home on leave I was enjoying family time and wanted to stay away from the computer as much as possible; and 3) When I got back around Thanksgiving I was so "happy" to be back that my mind just was not in the game. It still isn't, exactly, but it's a lot better than it was.
So a lot has happened over here since the middle of October. The good news is that by a lot of measures violence is down. The bad news is that there isn't a lot of analysis as to what the causes are. I see none of it in the papers or on the news. The worse news is that the Iraqi Government has failed to take advantage of the dip in the killing to solidify a cohesive government structure that shares power with the Sunnis. That is going to be a requirement for any long-term stability here.
Also, right before I went on leave I sent a letter to Stars and Stripes to register my dissatisfaction with them for carrying Ann Coulter's column. I know what you're thinking--that stupid bitch can get paid to write? Yes, it's true. Just go to the local bookstore. Anyway, the letter set off a string of hostile letters to Stars and Stripes defending her and calling me all sorts of names. Hey, the letter was a little over the top, maybe, but the irony of the whole matter was that I spoke in the same sort of tone that she uses in her column. The buttheads who love to read what she has to say got real angry when those same kinds of words were directed her way. Irony is just wasted on some people. The best parts of the whole thing were that 1) The day they printed the letter was the day I came home on leave; and 2) I signed my name with a non gender-specific nickname. That made it impossible to know who was really the one that sent the letter. It was beautiful!
I even got an e-mail from a Colonel Charles Mitchel at MNC-I headquarters asking if I was the one who had written the editorial in the paper that day. The guy got my "Out of Office " reply, so I guess he figured it wasn't me. I mean, don't you think that's completely inappropriate? What would have been the reply to me had I told him, "yes?" I can only imagine. Anyway, I regret that I wasn't present for the storm. But interestingly, I have had many people come to me and give me positive feedback for doing it. That made me feel pretty good.
That's all for now. I have lots to talk about, and I'll share it in the coming days and weeks, with pictures.
OUT
Friday, December 14, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
General Sanchez speaks out
Hello,
Today is just one more day in a year of long days. I'm only 14 days away from getting ready to go on leave. I can't wait. It will suck coming back, no doubt about it. I entertained the thought early on in this deployment of just not taking leave. In the end, I figured I owed it to myself and my family to go back when I could. it was nicely timed so that it's almost right in the middle of the deployment. When I get back we'll be more than 50% done.
So this past weekend LTG (R) Ricardo Sanchez, the Combined joint Task Force-7 (CJTF-7) Commander from 2003-2004 (or maybe until 2005, I can't remember). Anyway, he commanded what has morphed into Multi National Force-Iraq (MNF-I). He came out and said that this is a nightmare over here, with no end in sight. It was interesting the way he framed it. Basically he was saying that the political leadership constrained the military from fighting the war the way it should have, particularly by limiting force size. This is a man who many hold liable for the insurgency flourishing during the summer and fall of 2003. Thomas Ricks, in his book Fiasco is especially hard on his leadership. Maybe he's had time to reflect on what he could have done differently.
He also had little good to say about the surge. I wonder if what he is saying is representative of what other retired Generals are thinking. I just saw the Senate Minority Leader from Kentucky on the TV last night saying that the surge is working and we're making remarkable progress over here...that means the talking points are being sent out again. It ain't "working," everyone. The enemy knows that, and the soldiers know that. he made the statement to the effect that things in the south were quiet and peaceful. This is the same place where the Brits left and handed local control over to the Shiite militias. Quiet? Peaceful? How in the world can the surge be working there when there are no soldiers there? I am totally mystified by that statement. Again, the talking points have been distributed, and they are coming back out on the news. I am hoping that things work out here; I am not encouraged by what I have seen and what I know. So Mrs. Clinton, I hope you're paying attention. When you come in to office you need to have a plan ready to execute immediately.
OUT
Today is just one more day in a year of long days. I'm only 14 days away from getting ready to go on leave. I can't wait. It will suck coming back, no doubt about it. I entertained the thought early on in this deployment of just not taking leave. In the end, I figured I owed it to myself and my family to go back when I could. it was nicely timed so that it's almost right in the middle of the deployment. When I get back we'll be more than 50% done.
So this past weekend LTG (R) Ricardo Sanchez, the Combined joint Task Force-7 (CJTF-7) Commander from 2003-2004 (or maybe until 2005, I can't remember). Anyway, he commanded what has morphed into Multi National Force-Iraq (MNF-I). He came out and said that this is a nightmare over here, with no end in sight. It was interesting the way he framed it. Basically he was saying that the political leadership constrained the military from fighting the war the way it should have, particularly by limiting force size. This is a man who many hold liable for the insurgency flourishing during the summer and fall of 2003. Thomas Ricks, in his book Fiasco is especially hard on his leadership. Maybe he's had time to reflect on what he could have done differently.
He also had little good to say about the surge. I wonder if what he is saying is representative of what other retired Generals are thinking. I just saw the Senate Minority Leader from Kentucky on the TV last night saying that the surge is working and we're making remarkable progress over here...that means the talking points are being sent out again. It ain't "working," everyone. The enemy knows that, and the soldiers know that. he made the statement to the effect that things in the south were quiet and peaceful. This is the same place where the Brits left and handed local control over to the Shiite militias. Quiet? Peaceful? How in the world can the surge be working there when there are no soldiers there? I am totally mystified by that statement. Again, the talking points have been distributed, and they are coming back out on the news. I am hoping that things work out here; I am not encouraged by what I have seen and what I know. So Mrs. Clinton, I hope you're paying attention. When you come in to office you need to have a plan ready to execute immediately.
OUT
Saturday, October 13, 2007
Keeping us busy
So we had another rocket attack this past week. I'm a little bit surprised that the news got out so fast. They had the story nailed within about 12 hours. I don't think it was because MNC-I had a press release, either, although I'm sure they had to say something after the news got out. Fortunately, no one in my unit was injured, Unfortunately, 2 soldiers were killed and almost 40 were wounded. A couple of TCN's were injured, too. You know there are some places in this world that have dire poverty when the people will come to this place for a job.
So I think I talked about my fraternity brother in my last post...it is so ironic to run into him here. We hadn't seen each other in over 10 years, and it takes a war to bring us back together.
I was told that the statistics being reported about the numbers of insurgents being killed and captured are, shall we say, a little bit misleading. Units out there are fighting people who are connected through a spiderweb of alliances, tribal affiliations, gang affiliations, and sect affiliations. When the "insurgents" are killed and captured, however, they are reporting that they were members of Al Qaida. on a couple of levels, this is dishonest. First, a lot of the anti-coalition activity in the Baghdad area is done by Shia groups who hate Al Qaida in Iraq (AQIZ). Second, there is a great deal of internecine fighting going on between the Shia groups; they are jockeying for control. Third, the Sunni-Shia fighting that does occur is between Sunni and Shia. So all of these activities get counted as "anti-coalition" attacks or events, which clearly they are not. I don't want to sound like I'm nit-picking here, but what is being reported ends up being wrong, which then ends up influencing policy, which then produces a solution to the wrong problem--which then gets implemented, with the expectation that positive results will flow from it. It just won't work like that. We have soldiers doing a tremendous amount of work here, and that ends up getting wrapped around a policy that will not succeed. What amazes me is how the morale stays as high as it does. I think what happens is that the soldiers (who think about it) tend to internalize their doubts and keep them to themselves. Saying them out loud is tantamount to saying the Emperor has no clothes. And the soldiers plug along, doing the work of the superhero because that's why they came here.
One of my objectives here during this time was to do some informal professional development. I set out to read 5 books from the Army Chief of Staff's reading list. It is a list compiled for Officers and NCO's to use for learning about leadership in history, and to make the leaders of today think about what the leaders of the past have faced and how they solved the challenges of warfare and leadership, etc. So I have read two books already, and I'm on my third--The Memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant. It's actually a pretty readable book. Anyway, his take on the Mexican War, while I'm sitting in my CHU in the middle of Baghdad, is really kind of interesting. The Mexican War was 160 years ago, but it just demonstrated to me that officers of that time faced the same moral dilemma some of us struggle with in this war. And that's about all I've got to say about that.
I ordered a laptop, so when i get that online I'll be back to more frequent posts and I'll be putting up pictures again. Having to go to the MWR facility to post is a little inconvenient and I can't plug a thumb drive into the terminals here. I have a bunch of cool photos that I haven't been able to show, so in the next few weeks I will be putting a lot up. I go on leave next month, so I probably won't post too much then, but we'll see. Until next time...
OUT
So I think I talked about my fraternity brother in my last post...it is so ironic to run into him here. We hadn't seen each other in over 10 years, and it takes a war to bring us back together.
I was told that the statistics being reported about the numbers of insurgents being killed and captured are, shall we say, a little bit misleading. Units out there are fighting people who are connected through a spiderweb of alliances, tribal affiliations, gang affiliations, and sect affiliations. When the "insurgents" are killed and captured, however, they are reporting that they were members of Al Qaida. on a couple of levels, this is dishonest. First, a lot of the anti-coalition activity in the Baghdad area is done by Shia groups who hate Al Qaida in Iraq (AQIZ). Second, there is a great deal of internecine fighting going on between the Shia groups; they are jockeying for control. Third, the Sunni-Shia fighting that does occur is between Sunni and Shia. So all of these activities get counted as "anti-coalition" attacks or events, which clearly they are not. I don't want to sound like I'm nit-picking here, but what is being reported ends up being wrong, which then ends up influencing policy, which then produces a solution to the wrong problem--which then gets implemented, with the expectation that positive results will flow from it. It just won't work like that. We have soldiers doing a tremendous amount of work here, and that ends up getting wrapped around a policy that will not succeed. What amazes me is how the morale stays as high as it does. I think what happens is that the soldiers (who think about it) tend to internalize their doubts and keep them to themselves. Saying them out loud is tantamount to saying the Emperor has no clothes. And the soldiers plug along, doing the work of the superhero because that's why they came here.
One of my objectives here during this time was to do some informal professional development. I set out to read 5 books from the Army Chief of Staff's reading list. It is a list compiled for Officers and NCO's to use for learning about leadership in history, and to make the leaders of today think about what the leaders of the past have faced and how they solved the challenges of warfare and leadership, etc. So I have read two books already, and I'm on my third--The Memoirs of General Ulysses S. Grant. It's actually a pretty readable book. Anyway, his take on the Mexican War, while I'm sitting in my CHU in the middle of Baghdad, is really kind of interesting. The Mexican War was 160 years ago, but it just demonstrated to me that officers of that time faced the same moral dilemma some of us struggle with in this war. And that's about all I've got to say about that.
I ordered a laptop, so when i get that online I'll be back to more frequent posts and I'll be putting up pictures again. Having to go to the MWR facility to post is a little inconvenient and I can't plug a thumb drive into the terminals here. I have a bunch of cool photos that I haven't been able to show, so in the next few weeks I will be putting a lot up. I go on leave next month, so I probably won't post too much then, but we'll see. Until next time...
OUT
Saturday, October 6, 2007
First one of the month
I am now unable to post from the pc on my desk. That makes writing this blog extremely difficult to do. Mainly because I am reduced to using a laptop from the Pre-Cambrian period in one of the "internet cafes" here on the installation. It's tough using older equipment; it's even harder to use it when overuse has caused the keys on the keyboard to be virtually unreadable for most letters.
It took me about three tries to write that.
Lots to talk about, but I can't really do it here with this laptop. I will be writing for the next two days. I also need to get some sleep tonight because tomorrow I am running in an Army Ten-Miler "Shadow Run" here at VBC. A shadow run is a ten-miler being run on the same day as the official one, just somewhere else in the world. I'll be able to tell my kids and grand kids that I ran a shadow run in Baghdad one day. That's kind of cool.
Next time I write I will be on a better computer. Maybe I'll order a laptop now since the commander back home ok'd the purchase. But I want to talk about spending 48 hours here with a fraternity brother who also happens to be here in the Army. I hadn't seen him in probably 10 or 12 years, and it took a war to get us back together. Amazing. And I also have more to say about the rest of what's going on. And I have some awesome pictures. So, this has taken me about 25 minutes to type, and I've about had it. Talk to you all later. Be safe.
OUT
It took me about three tries to write that.
Lots to talk about, but I can't really do it here with this laptop. I will be writing for the next two days. I also need to get some sleep tonight because tomorrow I am running in an Army Ten-Miler "Shadow Run" here at VBC. A shadow run is a ten-miler being run on the same day as the official one, just somewhere else in the world. I'll be able to tell my kids and grand kids that I ran a shadow run in Baghdad one day. That's kind of cool.
Next time I write I will be on a better computer. Maybe I'll order a laptop now since the commander back home ok'd the purchase. But I want to talk about spending 48 hours here with a fraternity brother who also happens to be here in the Army. I hadn't seen him in probably 10 or 12 years, and it took a war to get us back together. Amazing. And I also have more to say about the rest of what's going on. And I have some awesome pictures. So, this has taken me about 25 minutes to type, and I've about had it. Talk to you all later. Be safe.
OUT
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
More fallout from the Report
Hey folks, just keeping it real in the field--out in Baghdad, Iraq, where in the mornings now it's actually pleasant and in the afternoons it's about as hot as it is at home on a hot summer day. In short, It has gotten pretty livable here.
I have been doing a little more reading this week--not reading the report from GEN Petraeus so much as reading some analysis done prior to the delivery of his report. I read another short paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (www.csis.org) regarding the effort over here. The title sums up the writer's thesis:
"America's Last Chance in Iraq: Changing US Strategy to Meet Iraq's Real Needs"
It is yet another short, fascinating analysis of the war done by CSIS. The first sentence should be read by every news anchor in the "Liberal News Media" before each story on the war: "America has no good options in Iraq, and the odds of any form of enduring success are even at best." The author, Anthony Cordesman, goes on to add what I think is the seminal point that the conservatives AND the liberals are really missing: that we have a moral obligation to take responsibility for what has happened here. Those who say that the "surge is working" and those who want immediate withdrawal are both failing to acknowledge that this is no longer an experiment in democracy, no political science class practical-exercise. There has been a huge amount of carnage and destruction here on the human side that we as a nation are morally accountable for. I never voted for The Decider, but enough people did that we now have this train wreck on our hands. We all have to come together to solve it.
As a logistician over here, I can tell you he is right on point when he enumerates the challenges of withdrawal. He also points out that we do not control the battlefield--in other words, there may be a time where we are forced out at a time not of our own choosing. In my opinion, when we decide to leave, the items that require the most effort to evacuate out of here are what the Army calls "major-end items;" i.e., trucks, tanks, MRAPs, weapons systems, etc. They obviously need to be some of the last things to leave with any unit that rolls out of here. If we take most of the usable major end items, demilitarize or destroy the ones that we don't want, and sell the remainder to the central government we should be pretty happy. They facilities here are no great shakes, but we need to stop using temporary solutions for them and start building lasting infrastructure that can be turned over to the Iraqis. Our failure to address the needs of the people has so embittered segments of the population towards us that some of this stuff might get destroyed anyway. I've said before that some of the mistakes here just can't be undone. Mr. Cordesman writes that the ideological nightmare of half-formed plans and the incompetence of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the beginning are two of the crucial early issues that have shaped the present situation.
Another interesting point Cordesman brings up is the situation in the southeastern part of the country. There was no surge there. The surge was mainly in Baghdad, Anbar, and Diyala. The British were the primary force down south until recently; now the Shi'ite militias are in control. 30% of the country's population and 80% of the oil exports are down there. The oil constitutes 90-95% of the entire government revenues, and this asset is in the hands of rival Shi'ite factions. Question: What do you think they are doing with the money? Hmm. Another interesting fact is that numerous factions are being supported by Iran, presumably because they are hedging their bets on who will come out on top. Furthermore, Iran is just as confused as we are about the alliances and loyalties of these groups. They are not controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, or the government of al-Maliki, or the Iranians for that matter. A lot of the factions are criminal enterprises.
I'm getting worn down by all this. It's like reading bad news every damn day. Is there room for optimism? Always. But realism needs to take hold in Washington, and I think that the question of how well the Iraqis can take over for us is summed up pretty well in Cordesman's report. The Iraqi Army is showing great promise, but we can't push too much onto them too soon or they'll cave. The regional police will end up being sectarian in composition in most places. And the national police "cannot be healed or reformed. They are a symbol of sectarian cleansing and Shi'ite abuse of Sunnis." Not a pretty picture. These NP's are infiltrated by the Shi'ite militias and just are useless.
I was going to post some pics, but the internet here has royally sucked for about three weeks, and stuff downloads and uploads so slowly that I don't have the patience. I have attempted to upload a picture for 20 solid minutes and...nothing. I'll try again next time.
OUT
I have been doing a little more reading this week--not reading the report from GEN Petraeus so much as reading some analysis done prior to the delivery of his report. I read another short paper from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (www.csis.org) regarding the effort over here. The title sums up the writer's thesis:
"America's Last Chance in Iraq: Changing US Strategy to Meet Iraq's Real Needs"
It is yet another short, fascinating analysis of the war done by CSIS. The first sentence should be read by every news anchor in the "Liberal News Media" before each story on the war: "America has no good options in Iraq, and the odds of any form of enduring success are even at best." The author, Anthony Cordesman, goes on to add what I think is the seminal point that the conservatives AND the liberals are really missing: that we have a moral obligation to take responsibility for what has happened here. Those who say that the "surge is working" and those who want immediate withdrawal are both failing to acknowledge that this is no longer an experiment in democracy, no political science class practical-exercise. There has been a huge amount of carnage and destruction here on the human side that we as a nation are morally accountable for. I never voted for The Decider, but enough people did that we now have this train wreck on our hands. We all have to come together to solve it.
As a logistician over here, I can tell you he is right on point when he enumerates the challenges of withdrawal. He also points out that we do not control the battlefield--in other words, there may be a time where we are forced out at a time not of our own choosing. In my opinion, when we decide to leave, the items that require the most effort to evacuate out of here are what the Army calls "major-end items;" i.e., trucks, tanks, MRAPs, weapons systems, etc. They obviously need to be some of the last things to leave with any unit that rolls out of here. If we take most of the usable major end items, demilitarize or destroy the ones that we don't want, and sell the remainder to the central government we should be pretty happy. They facilities here are no great shakes, but we need to stop using temporary solutions for them and start building lasting infrastructure that can be turned over to the Iraqis. Our failure to address the needs of the people has so embittered segments of the population towards us that some of this stuff might get destroyed anyway. I've said before that some of the mistakes here just can't be undone. Mr. Cordesman writes that the ideological nightmare of half-formed plans and the incompetence of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in the beginning are two of the crucial early issues that have shaped the present situation.
Another interesting point Cordesman brings up is the situation in the southeastern part of the country. There was no surge there. The surge was mainly in Baghdad, Anbar, and Diyala. The British were the primary force down south until recently; now the Shi'ite militias are in control. 30% of the country's population and 80% of the oil exports are down there. The oil constitutes 90-95% of the entire government revenues, and this asset is in the hands of rival Shi'ite factions. Question: What do you think they are doing with the money? Hmm. Another interesting fact is that numerous factions are being supported by Iran, presumably because they are hedging their bets on who will come out on top. Furthermore, Iran is just as confused as we are about the alliances and loyalties of these groups. They are not controlled by Moqtada al-Sadr, or the government of al-Maliki, or the Iranians for that matter. A lot of the factions are criminal enterprises.
I'm getting worn down by all this. It's like reading bad news every damn day. Is there room for optimism? Always. But realism needs to take hold in Washington, and I think that the question of how well the Iraqis can take over for us is summed up pretty well in Cordesman's report. The Iraqi Army is showing great promise, but we can't push too much onto them too soon or they'll cave. The regional police will end up being sectarian in composition in most places. And the national police "cannot be healed or reformed. They are a symbol of sectarian cleansing and Shi'ite abuse of Sunnis." Not a pretty picture. These NP's are infiltrated by the Shi'ite militias and just are useless.
I was going to post some pics, but the internet here has royally sucked for about three weeks, and stuff downloads and uploads so slowly that I don't have the patience. I have attempted to upload a picture for 20 solid minutes and...nothing. I'll try again next time.
OUT
Friday, September 21, 2007
Long week
Hello,
This has been a long week. Ramadan is in full swing, and the natives have decided they're going to get a little restless at night. It's not as dangerous as it is annoying. So, during the day they can't eat, drink or smoke at all. After sunset they eat. I guess after they get a full tummy they decide to go out and make some mischief. It will be nice when it's all over.
It's also been a long week because I spent all of last week giving a technical review to a bunch of proposals. Some of that was some dense reading. And at night, after I was done, I had to come in to the office and catch up on stuff I couldn't do during the day. This week has been like two weeks packed into one. And while it is cooling off at home, we are still having daytime highs hovering around 110 degrees. I know I've said this before, but I don't know how the Iraqis can stand it. They get power for a few hours a day if that, and have to sleep in the humid, hot night air. It's cool at night now (at least it feels cool; it could be 85 degrees for all I know) so it's not as bad as July and August, but still. At least when Saddam was in power they had that much.
Speaking of Saddam, I am finishing up a book called, The Generals War, by Bernard Trainor. It's amazing to read it now since it was published in 1995. There are names in there from the Bush Administration (Failure #2) like Powell and Cheney, but also people like Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. I just got through the last chapter and I'm reading into the Epilogue, and I'm serious, it's hard to read the last two chapters. Trainor didn't have a Magic 8-Ball, but he ties a lot of the "problems" we faced through the '90's with Saddam to the indecisive conclusion of the war. Reading that book, you really get a whole different sense of what happened during the war than one got reading the papers or watching the news at that time. Then, you knew the Air Force had done a lot of damage, but you got the idea that the Army had been fighting tooth and nail to get up into Iraq near Basra. It was actually the Marines who did most of the ground fighting. Furthermore, because Schwarzkopf was such a rigid thinker he didn't pick up clues along the way that should have told him the enemy wasn't going to stand and fight. That assumption guided his entire approach to the ground piece of the war. His objective was to destroy the Republican Guard. He never achieved it. He stopped the war--or allowed it to be stopped--before that happened, and it allowed Saddam to recover a lot of his fighting capability. That enabled him to hold on to power. We also stirred up the Shiites in southern Iraq, and they thought we'd come help them rise up. Problem was, when Bush was saying that he hoped the Iraqi people would rise up and topple Saddam, he really meant that he wanted to see someone in the military topple him; he didn't want the Shia to do it. So there was never any thought given to helping them as they got crushed by the units that streamed out of Kuwait and were reconstituted. By the way, 12 years later, these were the same Shia that Vice President Cheney said "would welcome us as liberators." He must have hoped they had one hell of a short memory.
Schwarzkopf comes out in the book as an interesting individual. He seemed to lose his spine when he had to confront Powell at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another thing that probably had negative effects at the end of the First Gulf War, and DEFINITELY had negative effects in the second one, was the military's absolute insistence that they were the ones who decided when they would leave the battlefield. This is what I mean: CENTCOM, commanded by Schwarzkopf, had every intention of getting the soldiers out of the Middle East as quickly as possible. That makes you incapable of really asserting yourself after the cease-fire. If things go wrong, you're already shipping personnel and equipment home, and the military had no intention of sticking around to enforce the peace. This group of officers were of the Vietnam-generation officer corps, and felt that the civilian leadership had abused them. They weren't going to allow it again. Well, because of the itch to get outta Dodge, Saddam stayed in power and we invaded 12 years later. And, oh by the way, when we invaded this time, again, the military had no plan to stick around to enforce the peace. The "Generation V" officers, after being subjected to a war they felt the civilians had lost for them, AND a decade (the 1990's) of peace keeping missions, felt a revulsion towards anything not directly related to the prosecution of war. The whole "we don't do peace-keeping" attitude ended up blowing up in their faces. If they did a little more peace-keeping they would have had to do a lot less war making.
And look where we are now. We have The Decider, a man utterly devoid of ideas and credibility, shooting off his mouth about a newspaper ad from MoveOn.org. I guess running off at the mouth about something like that keeps him from having to come up with a solution for the way out of this war. And again, going back to the book, when I see names in there like Wolfowitz and others it just makes my skin crawl. You know, we're still here and clowns like that are long, long gone. The Decider will transition from a completely broken president to a completely broken ex-president in about 16 months.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book. I'll blog some more shortly, and I promise I'll have some good pictures.
This has been a long week. Ramadan is in full swing, and the natives have decided they're going to get a little restless at night. It's not as dangerous as it is annoying. So, during the day they can't eat, drink or smoke at all. After sunset they eat. I guess after they get a full tummy they decide to go out and make some mischief. It will be nice when it's all over.
It's also been a long week because I spent all of last week giving a technical review to a bunch of proposals. Some of that was some dense reading. And at night, after I was done, I had to come in to the office and catch up on stuff I couldn't do during the day. This week has been like two weeks packed into one. And while it is cooling off at home, we are still having daytime highs hovering around 110 degrees. I know I've said this before, but I don't know how the Iraqis can stand it. They get power for a few hours a day if that, and have to sleep in the humid, hot night air. It's cool at night now (at least it feels cool; it could be 85 degrees for all I know) so it's not as bad as July and August, but still. At least when Saddam was in power they had that much.
Speaking of Saddam, I am finishing up a book called, The Generals War, by Bernard Trainor. It's amazing to read it now since it was published in 1995. There are names in there from the Bush Administration (Failure #2) like Powell and Cheney, but also people like Paul Wolfowitz and Zalmay Khalilzad. I just got through the last chapter and I'm reading into the Epilogue, and I'm serious, it's hard to read the last two chapters. Trainor didn't have a Magic 8-Ball, but he ties a lot of the "problems" we faced through the '90's with Saddam to the indecisive conclusion of the war. Reading that book, you really get a whole different sense of what happened during the war than one got reading the papers or watching the news at that time. Then, you knew the Air Force had done a lot of damage, but you got the idea that the Army had been fighting tooth and nail to get up into Iraq near Basra. It was actually the Marines who did most of the ground fighting. Furthermore, because Schwarzkopf was such a rigid thinker he didn't pick up clues along the way that should have told him the enemy wasn't going to stand and fight. That assumption guided his entire approach to the ground piece of the war. His objective was to destroy the Republican Guard. He never achieved it. He stopped the war--or allowed it to be stopped--before that happened, and it allowed Saddam to recover a lot of his fighting capability. That enabled him to hold on to power. We also stirred up the Shiites in southern Iraq, and they thought we'd come help them rise up. Problem was, when Bush was saying that he hoped the Iraqi people would rise up and topple Saddam, he really meant that he wanted to see someone in the military topple him; he didn't want the Shia to do it. So there was never any thought given to helping them as they got crushed by the units that streamed out of Kuwait and were reconstituted. By the way, 12 years later, these were the same Shia that Vice President Cheney said "would welcome us as liberators." He must have hoped they had one hell of a short memory.
Schwarzkopf comes out in the book as an interesting individual. He seemed to lose his spine when he had to confront Powell at the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Another thing that probably had negative effects at the end of the First Gulf War, and DEFINITELY had negative effects in the second one, was the military's absolute insistence that they were the ones who decided when they would leave the battlefield. This is what I mean: CENTCOM, commanded by Schwarzkopf, had every intention of getting the soldiers out of the Middle East as quickly as possible. That makes you incapable of really asserting yourself after the cease-fire. If things go wrong, you're already shipping personnel and equipment home, and the military had no intention of sticking around to enforce the peace. This group of officers were of the Vietnam-generation officer corps, and felt that the civilian leadership had abused them. They weren't going to allow it again. Well, because of the itch to get outta Dodge, Saddam stayed in power and we invaded 12 years later. And, oh by the way, when we invaded this time, again, the military had no plan to stick around to enforce the peace. The "Generation V" officers, after being subjected to a war they felt the civilians had lost for them, AND a decade (the 1990's) of peace keeping missions, felt a revulsion towards anything not directly related to the prosecution of war. The whole "we don't do peace-keeping" attitude ended up blowing up in their faces. If they did a little more peace-keeping they would have had to do a lot less war making.
And look where we are now. We have The Decider, a man utterly devoid of ideas and credibility, shooting off his mouth about a newspaper ad from MoveOn.org. I guess running off at the mouth about something like that keeps him from having to come up with a solution for the way out of this war. And again, going back to the book, when I see names in there like Wolfowitz and others it just makes my skin crawl. You know, we're still here and clowns like that are long, long gone. The Decider will transition from a completely broken president to a completely broken ex-president in about 16 months.
Anyway, I highly recommend the book. I'll blog some more shortly, and I promise I'll have some good pictures.
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Drama
So we got some incoming this past week. Had a little drama. Fortunately no one in my unit was hurt, so that's a good thing. I have been so busy that I really haven't had much time to take a whole lot of pictures. And we're definitely forbidden from taking pictures of anything that may get damaged from fire from the outside.
The workload here is just going up and up. We are getting just a ton of materials and supplies that were ordered by the unit we relieved, and my piece of land to store it in is starting to get pretty cluttered.
Anyway, the big news of the week, aside from our own little drama, was the drama taking place in Washington. You know, the Democrats are really disappointing me. I don't know what's going on over there, but they have had 10 months to come up with alternative plans to counter what The Decider has "decided" to do, but they've come up with nothing. They should be going on the offensive here, and the silence is just deafening. I can't believe they aren't out there picking apart the report and the testimony delivered last week. The violence here is down? Really...I just spent a week reviewing construction proposals, and every one of these proposals had a plan to house the workers in a compound within the walls of the base they were building on. It wasn't for convenience, because these companies were going to hire Iraqis. It was for security so the workforce didn't get killed. They were also discussing keeping the materials from being stolen or destroyed on the roads. If the security situation is so "good," if "the surge is working," why is this necessary? What "work" was the surge supposed to do?
i found one comment GEN Petraeus made to be particularly noteworthy. He said words to the effect that most if not all of the military goals of the surge had been met. I don't disagree with that statement. The problem is, and the so-called "Liberal News Media" never quite got the implication of that statement, the goal of the surge was a political one, not a military one. Meeting the military objectives was supposed to enable the political objectives to happen. By The Decider's own math, the government here is not meeting all 18 benchmarks. I'd love to give an 'atta-boy for making a nice effort, but people are dying over here. Americans, Iraqis, and even a few coalition forces. "Nice try's" are pretty irrelevant when the killing and the ethnic cleansing go on without pause. I tell people, what would you think if there were as many killings in Baltimore (or wherever you live) every day or every week as there are here? You'd think it was complete chaos. If not chaos, you'd probably wonder how people can live like that and not be irreparably harmed. But hey, all we hear from the right-wing G.O.P. TV on Fox, and the Lazy News Media of the mainstream, is that "the surge is working." If I see one more Republican Senator or Congressman mouth those words on TV I will just throw up.
The troops here are tired. The morale from what I can tell is pretty good, but damn they are tired. And a few people who are "outside the wire" guys with some experience under their belt wholeheartedly agree with the Jones Report (referenced in an earlier post): the Iraqi Security Forces cannot do the job. Period. They can't now, and won't be able to a year from now. But hey, with the crew making the decisions now, it's all about being able to blame the guy who follows Bush. It's gonna be a Democrat if they pull their heads out of their fourth point of contact (military for "ass"). And I can see it now: that the Democrats will be in a situation of no-win choices. And the Republicans will be lobbing bombs from the sidelines, as if 8 years of filth and lies and misguided, dogmatic policies never happened. I don't have a crystal ball, but believe it, folks. That day is coming.
Tomorrow I'll try to get some interesting pictures. I got a tripod, so now when I take longer-range shots they'll be steady. We'll see. Talk to you in a bit...
The workload here is just going up and up. We are getting just a ton of materials and supplies that were ordered by the unit we relieved, and my piece of land to store it in is starting to get pretty cluttered.
Anyway, the big news of the week, aside from our own little drama, was the drama taking place in Washington. You know, the Democrats are really disappointing me. I don't know what's going on over there, but they have had 10 months to come up with alternative plans to counter what The Decider has "decided" to do, but they've come up with nothing. They should be going on the offensive here, and the silence is just deafening. I can't believe they aren't out there picking apart the report and the testimony delivered last week. The violence here is down? Really...I just spent a week reviewing construction proposals, and every one of these proposals had a plan to house the workers in a compound within the walls of the base they were building on. It wasn't for convenience, because these companies were going to hire Iraqis. It was for security so the workforce didn't get killed. They were also discussing keeping the materials from being stolen or destroyed on the roads. If the security situation is so "good," if "the surge is working," why is this necessary? What "work" was the surge supposed to do?
i found one comment GEN Petraeus made to be particularly noteworthy. He said words to the effect that most if not all of the military goals of the surge had been met. I don't disagree with that statement. The problem is, and the so-called "Liberal News Media" never quite got the implication of that statement, the goal of the surge was a political one, not a military one. Meeting the military objectives was supposed to enable the political objectives to happen. By The Decider's own math, the government here is not meeting all 18 benchmarks. I'd love to give an 'atta-boy for making a nice effort, but people are dying over here. Americans, Iraqis, and even a few coalition forces. "Nice try's" are pretty irrelevant when the killing and the ethnic cleansing go on without pause. I tell people, what would you think if there were as many killings in Baltimore (or wherever you live) every day or every week as there are here? You'd think it was complete chaos. If not chaos, you'd probably wonder how people can live like that and not be irreparably harmed. But hey, all we hear from the right-wing G.O.P. TV on Fox, and the Lazy News Media of the mainstream, is that "the surge is working." If I see one more Republican Senator or Congressman mouth those words on TV I will just throw up.
The troops here are tired. The morale from what I can tell is pretty good, but damn they are tired. And a few people who are "outside the wire" guys with some experience under their belt wholeheartedly agree with the Jones Report (referenced in an earlier post): the Iraqi Security Forces cannot do the job. Period. They can't now, and won't be able to a year from now. But hey, with the crew making the decisions now, it's all about being able to blame the guy who follows Bush. It's gonna be a Democrat if they pull their heads out of their fourth point of contact (military for "ass"). And I can see it now: that the Democrats will be in a situation of no-win choices. And the Republicans will be lobbing bombs from the sidelines, as if 8 years of filth and lies and misguided, dogmatic policies never happened. I don't have a crystal ball, but believe it, folks. That day is coming.
Tomorrow I'll try to get some interesting pictures. I got a tripod, so now when I take longer-range shots they'll be steady. We'll see. Talk to you in a bit...
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
The "Report"
So, the CG of Multi-National Forces-Iraq (MNF-I) has given his testimony to Congress. Bush did an excellent job of minimizing expectations, and predictably, the Democrats failed the country. Great. Looks like we're staying the course until January 20, 2009.
The thing that angers me is that this is such a colossal waste. Not just American lives, but hundreds of Iraqis are killed every week. The White House may direct that the statistics get massaged to reflect what they want, but Jesus, the situation isn't a whole lot better here. We still can't leave the base. They are still firing junk on our position. Guys are still dying. And what is happening in Washington? They're playing footsie under the bathroom stall. What a damn disgrace.
The surge has done such a great job, it's "working" so well, according to John McCain and others, that when we bid construction contracts they have to build a compound for these guys to live in for their safety. That's pretty standard. Amazing. We still run convoys with armed escorts up and down the roads. When will The Surge That Is Working end that practice? I was watching The News Hour on PBS over here and Jim Lehrer asked Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) if he thought Gen Petraeus was "spinning" the report to reflect what he wanted it to say. Lugar's response was very interesting. I am paraphrasing because it was like 14 hours ago that I saw it, but he basically said that Petraeus came prepared to deliver a point of view and he defended that point of view. To my ears, calling it a "point of view" was significant. Here is a Senator who is widely acknowledged to have credibility in foreign affairs saying that the guy was not presenting a balanced, objective report. I mean, hey, what would have happened if he reported that this is a total fiasco? He's have been awarded The Solid Brass Balls Award and been shown the door. Besides, they are all complicit in this mess and they truly want the chance to make right with it all. I can respect that. But damn, this mission is lost, folks. Lost.
So what do we do now? In my own humble opinion, I think that what we need to do is start making deals. We will never, ever create a government here that replicates our own. In fact, Sen. Lugar pointed out on the News Hour this morning that the Iraqi Constitution--the one we strong-armed them into creating--specifies that the central government does not have the sort of power that ours has; the power is decentralized. I think the conservatives would call this concept "States' Rights." Here it is done to acknowledge the power and influence in this culture of clan and tribal ties and lines of authority. Man, and the Neoconservatives that created this mess just thought that we could come in here, knock off Saddam, and all would be well. How childish. And people voted for them? I would be ashamed to have that much blood on my hands, I know that much. But I tend to think that Bush sleeps like a baby at night. He's got a place waiting for him when he goes to the next world.
Till next time, go to this website and read the Jones Report regarding the capabilities of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF): http://forums.csis.org/isf.pdf
OUT
The thing that angers me is that this is such a colossal waste. Not just American lives, but hundreds of Iraqis are killed every week. The White House may direct that the statistics get massaged to reflect what they want, but Jesus, the situation isn't a whole lot better here. We still can't leave the base. They are still firing junk on our position. Guys are still dying. And what is happening in Washington? They're playing footsie under the bathroom stall. What a damn disgrace.
The surge has done such a great job, it's "working" so well, according to John McCain and others, that when we bid construction contracts they have to build a compound for these guys to live in for their safety. That's pretty standard. Amazing. We still run convoys with armed escorts up and down the roads. When will The Surge That Is Working end that practice? I was watching The News Hour on PBS over here and Jim Lehrer asked Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) if he thought Gen Petraeus was "spinning" the report to reflect what he wanted it to say. Lugar's response was very interesting. I am paraphrasing because it was like 14 hours ago that I saw it, but he basically said that Petraeus came prepared to deliver a point of view and he defended that point of view. To my ears, calling it a "point of view" was significant. Here is a Senator who is widely acknowledged to have credibility in foreign affairs saying that the guy was not presenting a balanced, objective report. I mean, hey, what would have happened if he reported that this is a total fiasco? He's have been awarded The Solid Brass Balls Award and been shown the door. Besides, they are all complicit in this mess and they truly want the chance to make right with it all. I can respect that. But damn, this mission is lost, folks. Lost.
So what do we do now? In my own humble opinion, I think that what we need to do is start making deals. We will never, ever create a government here that replicates our own. In fact, Sen. Lugar pointed out on the News Hour this morning that the Iraqi Constitution--the one we strong-armed them into creating--specifies that the central government does not have the sort of power that ours has; the power is decentralized. I think the conservatives would call this concept "States' Rights." Here it is done to acknowledge the power and influence in this culture of clan and tribal ties and lines of authority. Man, and the Neoconservatives that created this mess just thought that we could come in here, knock off Saddam, and all would be well. How childish. And people voted for them? I would be ashamed to have that much blood on my hands, I know that much. But I tend to think that Bush sleeps like a baby at night. He's got a place waiting for him when he goes to the next world.
Till next time, go to this website and read the Jones Report regarding the capabilities of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF): http://forums.csis.org/isf.pdf
OUT
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Football Season's here!
So as I write this entry it is about 20 minutes before 9:00 pm. The football season started on Thursday with the (formerly Baltimore) Colts thumping the Saints. Tonight--today in the US--is when the first Sunday football games start. The Ravens are my team, and they play tomorrow night against the Bengals. If the Ravens play on offense they way they are capable, and play solid defense they will win. If Ed Reed freelances too much and gets burned, or they pick on Samari Rolle, ballgame. They lose. The Ravens have not been a very good come from behind team for some time, if ever. They have to play carefully.
So I have spent a lot of time out of the office this past week because we are getting all kinds of supplies in here and I have to coordinate the pick up and movement to our Class IV Yard. "Class IV" is the Army Supply Class that includes engineer barrier material, construction material, etc. Class II includes stuff like tents and shelters. Anyway, we just got an avalanche of that kind of stuff last week. Here is how the stuff has to be handled:
+00007.jpg)
I took the picture in black & white on a lark just to see how it looked. I may do that a little more when I take pictures of people. We'll see. That container fits right onto the back of a 40' flatbed truck, which then carries the whole thing to wherever it needs to go. They also make them in 53' and 20' sizes. They are both designed to go on trucks, ships, and trains. You got some smart people who can figure out how to make something that will fit on all those modes of transport, plus will carry more cargo than if you just packed the stuff on pallets or in boxes.
The place that I put most of this stuff is here:
What I will do before I leave this place is get some video of these machines to show my son when I get home. He loves watching construction machines.
I was thinking about the band I saw perform here last night, and I would compare them to a micro-brew beer: they may not be available in a lot of places, but they are high-quality. It makes you wonder, how many other bands are out there like this one that probably get very little support from their record label (if they have one)? Why do we get fed the corporate BS music when there are bands like this out there that you never hear on the radio? Thank goodness they came out on this tour, and I definitely want to thank and give kudos to the folks at USO for getting them out here. They have an ear for talent, for sure. It was just a very cool time.
Anyway, time for football!!! Gotta run. I will be in meetings almost all of this week, so my blogging my pause. If I do get to it, I may do a little venting, so please have patience with me...thanks!
So I have spent a lot of time out of the office this past week because we are getting all kinds of supplies in here and I have to coordinate the pick up and movement to our Class IV Yard. "Class IV" is the Army Supply Class that includes engineer barrier material, construction material, etc. Class II includes stuff like tents and shelters. Anyway, we just got an avalanche of that kind of stuff last week. Here is how the stuff has to be handled:
+00007.jpg)
I took the picture in black & white on a lark just to see how it looked. I may do that a little more when I take pictures of people. We'll see. That container fits right onto the back of a 40' flatbed truck, which then carries the whole thing to wherever it needs to go. They also make them in 53' and 20' sizes. They are both designed to go on trucks, ships, and trains. You got some smart people who can figure out how to make something that will fit on all those modes of transport, plus will carry more cargo than if you just packed the stuff on pallets or in boxes.
The place that I put most of this stuff is here:
What I will do before I leave this place is get some video of these machines to show my son when I get home. He loves watching construction machines.
I was thinking about the band I saw perform here last night, and I would compare them to a micro-brew beer: they may not be available in a lot of places, but they are high-quality. It makes you wonder, how many other bands are out there like this one that probably get very little support from their record label (if they have one)? Why do we get fed the corporate BS music when there are bands like this out there that you never hear on the radio? Thank goodness they came out on this tour, and I definitely want to thank and give kudos to the folks at USO for getting them out here. They have an ear for talent, for sure. It was just a very cool time.
Anyway, time for football!!! Gotta run. I will be in meetings almost all of this week, so my blogging my pause. If I do get to it, I may do a little venting, so please have patience with me...thanks!
Saturday, September 8, 2007
MWR Night
Tonight we had a surprise performance by a pretty cool band from California. They're called Wilson Gil and the Willful Sinners. They're a rock and roll band that kind of makes you think about all those bar bands you saw when you were in college that just rocked the house when you saw them. They were really, really good. They were also pretty funny in between some of the songs. They had a pretty strong stage presence. Here's a picture of me with Tony Gil himself:
That's Staff Sergeant Fiorani in the background being a doofus. That's not like him; he's usually the doofus in the foreground.
They were really cool. Listening to an American rock band in Baghdad is a little strange. I talked with one of the guys in the band (Joe Dean) who mentioned that this was definitely one of the more "different" venues they've played. I imagine Afghanistan is a lot more austere. They played there during the summer.
They also are down with an energy drink they have here in the DFACs called "Rip-it." It's just like Red Bull except for the price tag. It's free! Woo hoo! They were all trippin' on the stuff. I'll tell you what, I have my own stash in my office cube for when I need a little boost.
Like I said, if you get the chance to see this band you need to do it. Great bunch of guys, and great music. Coming over here to play for us takes some courage. They aren't even armed.
Check out their website: http://www.wilsongil.com
Thanks guys!
That's Staff Sergeant Fiorani in the background being a doofus. That's not like him; he's usually the doofus in the foreground.
They were really cool. Listening to an American rock band in Baghdad is a little strange. I talked with one of the guys in the band (Joe Dean) who mentioned that this was definitely one of the more "different" venues they've played. I imagine Afghanistan is a lot more austere. They played there during the summer.
They also are down with an energy drink they have here in the DFACs called "Rip-it." It's just like Red Bull except for the price tag. It's free! Woo hoo! They were all trippin' on the stuff. I'll tell you what, I have my own stash in my office cube for when I need a little boost.
Like I said, if you get the chance to see this band you need to do it. Great bunch of guys, and great music. Coming over here to play for us takes some courage. They aren't even armed.
Check out their website: http://www.wilsongil.com
Thanks guys!
Friday, September 7, 2007
Get ready for next week
Here we are again on another Friday. This week, like almost every week since I have been here, has flown by. That's a good thing. My leave comes up in a couple of months and if the weeks go by like this, I'll be home in no time at all. It will be an exciting flight going home, and a very depressing one coming back. How could I be happy leaving this behind?
I learned a lot about the global commercial transportation system these last ten weeks. It's amazing how long it can take some things to get here. The mail can get here as quickly as 5 days. The supplies that come over on ships can take two months or more. I got slammed today with 11 40' trucks worth of stuff that I had to sign for and take possession of. It took a full 7 hours to get this stuff loaded, moved less than 2 miles, then off-loaded. I am smoked! It wasn't as hot as normal today, maybe only around 105 or so.
DAMN!! I just checked it out--it was only 95 degrees at 6 o'clock tonight. I thought it felt cool!
Anyway, the moral of that little story is that when it rains it pours--I had nothing come in that I needed for weeks, and all of a sudden I get 11 truckloads of stuff the unit we replaced had ordered. They left two months ago.
So next week GEN Petraeus delivers the report that the White House will be writing for him. I do not envy that man. He is being set up for failure, and to be honest, both parties share some blame. The Republicans are blowing the trumpets, saying that "the surge is working," when it isn't. And some of the Democrats are backing away from twisting Bush's arm about getting out of here. let me tell you something--the soldiers here want to do the job. They want to do it right, and they want to go home. Morale is pretty good, but they are tired. This is my first tour here; I personally know guys who have been here two, three, and four times. It's time for this junk to end. The Democrats, instead of speaking loudly, they need to get into a meeting with Bush and hammer his ass. Problem is they're too beaten down, and I think probably still a little hesitant to use the same disgusting, soulless political tactics against Bush that he used in them. I say go for it--and do it soon. Meanwhile the meat grinder goes marching on. Petraeus now says that we can start sending a Brigade home by Christmas. I have a feeling it won't be ours.
Check out the GAO report here:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071195.pdf
I really get irritated when Bush and the cronies claim that the tribes in Anbar are coming over to our side because of the surge. That is complete BS--the fact is that Al-Qaida in Iraq (the Iraqi-populated Al-Qaida, not the Osama bin Laden Al-Qaida) was forcing the tribes in Anbar province (and Diyala to a lesser extent) to intermarry with them in order to insinuate themselves into the tribal and clan fabric of these areas. The sheiks resisted, and it escalated very quickly from threats to targeted murder to mass murder. The sheiks finally said, "enough," and that's when they turned. If you read the CSIS paper that I linked in a previous post, you'll see that this current cooperation with the government and US forces is in their self-interest; if the tribes feel like the government here won't give them a fair shake all bets are off and they'll be shooting at us again. Anthony Cordesman gave the government up to 180 days to give the Sunni tribes a place at the table or else they go back to being hostile. So, how did an extra 5 brigades enable that to happen? It didn't. And it started well before the surge, anyway. The extra troops here in-country are in a position to exploit this development, and let's hope we do. But as has been said already, the military has held up its part of the bargain. There is nothing else we can do--we have reached the limit of our effectiveness. The Iraqi politicians have to sort their stuff out.
And on the subject of shooting, that plane that was shot at (the one with the Senators and Congressman) was flying out of here last Friday. In fact, I saw one of the Senators--Richard Shelby from Alabama--in the chow hall around 5:30 or 6:00 that night. Then three hours later he's getting shot at. I swear--I had nothing to do with it!!
It would have hit the fan if that plane had gone down. Whew! Well, Bush would still say "the surge is working," I guarantee you that. I think he's drinking again, to be honest with you. Both him and Cheney. The depression and shame they must face every morning would crush me. But I wouldn't be that arrogant and dumb and disgusting to start with. I'm ranting...anyway, pay close attention next week when the General is in Washington. Read between the lines.
So a few more pictures. This is where I live. It's called "Freedom Village." We call it, "The Ville."
Sometimes I end up spending a lot of time in that trailer in the foreground. I don't know what I'd do for a home-cooked meal right now...but it would be a lot.
There is a lot of history at this place. There is a place down on Camp Striker called "The Zoo." There was actually a zoo down there, with tigers and birds and stuff. There was a story when the war was going on about tigers being loose in Baghdad--they came from here. They were so malnourished that they had to be killed. But here are some pictures of the area (what's left of it).
Nothing says, "4th Infantry Division was here" quite like this:
This was probably someones home who had some importance...
And if whoever lived there was tired of walking around, hell, they could take the dinghy.
And this is me, taken about 4 hours ago:
One other thing about the tigers--I was told by someone who was here in 2004 that back in '04 they found that a tiger was up in one of the camps here that was called, at the time, "Tigerland." When the Iraqis still owned the place it was where they let wild animals loose and hunted 'em. Hearing that I immediately thought of the Loeuvre in Paris. Anyway, they discovered him up there hiding in the tall grass by one of the canals and had to go find him with a humvee and shoot him with a .50 cal. Imagine walking to the shower trailer one night and finding a tiger eyeing you up for dinner.
This was going to be a short post. When I took that picture I was tired and hungry. Now I'm even more tired. This post rambled a little bit, but like I said up top pay attention next week. It's about to get very interesting.
OUT
I learned a lot about the global commercial transportation system these last ten weeks. It's amazing how long it can take some things to get here. The mail can get here as quickly as 5 days. The supplies that come over on ships can take two months or more. I got slammed today with 11 40' trucks worth of stuff that I had to sign for and take possession of. It took a full 7 hours to get this stuff loaded, moved less than 2 miles, then off-loaded. I am smoked! It wasn't as hot as normal today, maybe only around 105 or so.
DAMN!! I just checked it out--it was only 95 degrees at 6 o'clock tonight. I thought it felt cool!
Anyway, the moral of that little story is that when it rains it pours--I had nothing come in that I needed for weeks, and all of a sudden I get 11 truckloads of stuff the unit we replaced had ordered. They left two months ago.
So next week GEN Petraeus delivers the report that the White House will be writing for him. I do not envy that man. He is being set up for failure, and to be honest, both parties share some blame. The Republicans are blowing the trumpets, saying that "the surge is working," when it isn't. And some of the Democrats are backing away from twisting Bush's arm about getting out of here. let me tell you something--the soldiers here want to do the job. They want to do it right, and they want to go home. Morale is pretty good, but they are tired. This is my first tour here; I personally know guys who have been here two, three, and four times. It's time for this junk to end. The Democrats, instead of speaking loudly, they need to get into a meeting with Bush and hammer his ass. Problem is they're too beaten down, and I think probably still a little hesitant to use the same disgusting, soulless political tactics against Bush that he used in them. I say go for it--and do it soon. Meanwhile the meat grinder goes marching on. Petraeus now says that we can start sending a Brigade home by Christmas. I have a feeling it won't be ours.
Check out the GAO report here:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d071195.pdf
I really get irritated when Bush and the cronies claim that the tribes in Anbar are coming over to our side because of the surge. That is complete BS--the fact is that Al-Qaida in Iraq (the Iraqi-populated Al-Qaida, not the Osama bin Laden Al-Qaida) was forcing the tribes in Anbar province (and Diyala to a lesser extent) to intermarry with them in order to insinuate themselves into the tribal and clan fabric of these areas. The sheiks resisted, and it escalated very quickly from threats to targeted murder to mass murder. The sheiks finally said, "enough," and that's when they turned. If you read the CSIS paper that I linked in a previous post, you'll see that this current cooperation with the government and US forces is in their self-interest; if the tribes feel like the government here won't give them a fair shake all bets are off and they'll be shooting at us again. Anthony Cordesman gave the government up to 180 days to give the Sunni tribes a place at the table or else they go back to being hostile. So, how did an extra 5 brigades enable that to happen? It didn't. And it started well before the surge, anyway. The extra troops here in-country are in a position to exploit this development, and let's hope we do. But as has been said already, the military has held up its part of the bargain. There is nothing else we can do--we have reached the limit of our effectiveness. The Iraqi politicians have to sort their stuff out.
And on the subject of shooting, that plane that was shot at (the one with the Senators and Congressman) was flying out of here last Friday. In fact, I saw one of the Senators--Richard Shelby from Alabama--in the chow hall around 5:30 or 6:00 that night. Then three hours later he's getting shot at. I swear--I had nothing to do with it!!
It would have hit the fan if that plane had gone down. Whew! Well, Bush would still say "the surge is working," I guarantee you that. I think he's drinking again, to be honest with you. Both him and Cheney. The depression and shame they must face every morning would crush me. But I wouldn't be that arrogant and dumb and disgusting to start with. I'm ranting...anyway, pay close attention next week when the General is in Washington. Read between the lines.
So a few more pictures. This is where I live. It's called "Freedom Village." We call it, "The Ville."
Sometimes I end up spending a lot of time in that trailer in the foreground. I don't know what I'd do for a home-cooked meal right now...but it would be a lot.
There is a lot of history at this place. There is a place down on Camp Striker called "The Zoo." There was actually a zoo down there, with tigers and birds and stuff. There was a story when the war was going on about tigers being loose in Baghdad--they came from here. They were so malnourished that they had to be killed. But here are some pictures of the area (what's left of it).
Nothing says, "4th Infantry Division was here" quite like this:
This was probably someones home who had some importance...
And if whoever lived there was tired of walking around, hell, they could take the dinghy.
And this is me, taken about 4 hours ago:
One other thing about the tigers--I was told by someone who was here in 2004 that back in '04 they found that a tiger was up in one of the camps here that was called, at the time, "Tigerland." When the Iraqis still owned the place it was where they let wild animals loose and hunted 'em. Hearing that I immediately thought of the Loeuvre in Paris. Anyway, they discovered him up there hiding in the tall grass by one of the canals and had to go find him with a humvee and shoot him with a .50 cal. Imagine walking to the shower trailer one night and finding a tiger eyeing you up for dinner.
This was going to be a short post. When I took that picture I was tired and hungry. Now I'm even more tired. This post rambled a little bit, but like I said up top pay attention next week. It's about to get very interesting.
OUT
Monday, September 3, 2007
Busy week
Hey Folks,
I was out of the loop all last week because we were at a pretty high OPTEMPO here. Lots of stuff to do to prepare for upgrading and expanding facilities. It is amazing how fast the day can go by. I feel guilty telling my wife how fast time flies here because she's at home with our five-year-old, in a big house, managing the home and trying to squeeze a few minutes out of each day for herself. Sometimes she'll get a few moments, most times she doesn't. It's definitely not easy. Here's a picture of my little buddy:
They went to the beach this year, and he caught himself a ghost crab. He wanted to play with it (these things have pinchers, by the way) and convinced Mom to let him bring it back to the cottage with him. Crabs need to be at the ocean or they die. This one has definitely expired, but hey--he's still having a rockin' time with it! Good for him. I get to spend ten months at the beach. What sucks is that they won't let me go to the ocean.
So I go back to my CHU after chow and turn the TV on while I'm changing. Armed Forces Network (AFN) has about 9 channels, and they do a pretty good job of mixing up the programming. There is a re-run of an episode of "60 Minutes" with one of the Marines involved in the Haditha killings being interviewed. Apparently he is the only one still charged with murder. The guy doing the interview is just such a sanctimonious a**hole; I mean, these dramatic little squints and expressions and sighs for the camera...that Marine had to have the patience of Job not to roundhouse kick this jackass square on the mouth. And I'm watching this interview with this sense that the guy doing the interview is judging the Marine in front of him, asking these gentle little leading questions, like, "But Bill (or whatever the sergeant's name is--I can't remember), throwing grenades into rooms of a house...how can you do that? How do you do that without getting PID (positive identification)?" Jesus...Close quarters battle (CQB) is extremely dangerous and you have less time to react than a guy has to swing at a fastball, and this is life or death, not sports. You clear a room with shock and speed, not by slogging through the house like you want to buy it.
Another thing the questioner did was sneer at the way we are trained to identify hostile acts and hostile intent. The sergeant made a pretty good attempt at explaining it, but hey--that just wasn't good enough to this guy. The Iraqis know what to do, and that's what the Marine said--they know the deal. If something goes boom, and they get accosted by Americans, stop, show your hands, get on the ground, and allow yourself to be searched. They KNOW the deal. These guys--according to the sergeant--were stopped in a car a hundred meters from where the IED destroyed a vehicle, killing at least one initially and wounding others. He thought they were involved. At the time, radio-controlled IED's (RCIED's) were being used by insurgents in some parts of the country.
Anyway, they were ordered out of the car, and--according to the sergeant--attempted to flee. Yes, folks, that can constitute hostile intent. How?? This is how--they know to get down and be searched. If they flee they could be fleeing in order to fight another day. They are refusing to follow orders in this case, and therefore displaying hostile intent--the intent to not comply. I wasn't there, but this guy claims they ran. No one there at the time (that I am aware of) says anything different. You're going to indict the guy because everyone on the scene agrees? Wonderful...
These guys were ambushed and assaulted three houses they thought they received small arms fire from. In my opinion, from what I know of the incident, yeah, they overreacted. The smugness of this guy asking the questions was just vomit-worthy. Give the Marine some credit--he has a pair of solid brass swingers for even agreeing to do the interview, and he kept his cool throughout. But it just left a bad taste in my mouth, so I was motivated to go workout. Not like I was when "Cheryl" was running her mouth at me, but close. Anyway, other stuff is going on here...
Bush made a spot visit to Iraq today. His remarks were, um...I don't know, a little underwhelming, maybe. What the heck can he say at this point? He's desperate to back up his "Mission Accomplished" moment. This is so far gone from what they thought they accomplished; it's nothing like they thought it would ever be. It will never be what they thought they had created. It never was. It never could be. They have prepped the battlefield for the report next week to be delivered by GEN Petraeus. Oddly, he's delivering it with the US Ambassador here, but the White House is actually writing it. Am I the only one who thinks that is totally bizarre? With all the brainpower over here, they don't trust the man in charge to write the report, so the political hacks and cronies will write it for him; it gets presented as "his" report, and he takes the HEAT rounds for it from both sides. Yeah, a real profile in courage from the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just remember the old adage--believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.
So here are some more photos of T-walls I took in the last few days, and baby you can believe them:
This one was simple but really well done.
Here's a good one:
I love it because the Personnel Services Branch (PSB) unit here is all gung-ho and stuff. Definitely a lot of esprit de corps.
Here's another good one. I love the eagle holding the mailbag:
Even the postal company is keeping it real with the T-wall art. Here are a couple more:
Here's one from the MP unit that just rolled out of here:
These guys are down on Camp Striker:
Okay, time for bed for me. I'm beat. I'll be back at it soon. Next time I'll post pictures of one of the compounds here that used to be pretty nice before the war. See you later.
I was out of the loop all last week because we were at a pretty high OPTEMPO here. Lots of stuff to do to prepare for upgrading and expanding facilities. It is amazing how fast the day can go by. I feel guilty telling my wife how fast time flies here because she's at home with our five-year-old, in a big house, managing the home and trying to squeeze a few minutes out of each day for herself. Sometimes she'll get a few moments, most times she doesn't. It's definitely not easy. Here's a picture of my little buddy:
They went to the beach this year, and he caught himself a ghost crab. He wanted to play with it (these things have pinchers, by the way) and convinced Mom to let him bring it back to the cottage with him. Crabs need to be at the ocean or they die. This one has definitely expired, but hey--he's still having a rockin' time with it! Good for him. I get to spend ten months at the beach. What sucks is that they won't let me go to the ocean.
So I go back to my CHU after chow and turn the TV on while I'm changing. Armed Forces Network (AFN) has about 9 channels, and they do a pretty good job of mixing up the programming. There is a re-run of an episode of "60 Minutes" with one of the Marines involved in the Haditha killings being interviewed. Apparently he is the only one still charged with murder. The guy doing the interview is just such a sanctimonious a**hole; I mean, these dramatic little squints and expressions and sighs for the camera...that Marine had to have the patience of Job not to roundhouse kick this jackass square on the mouth. And I'm watching this interview with this sense that the guy doing the interview is judging the Marine in front of him, asking these gentle little leading questions, like, "But Bill (or whatever the sergeant's name is--I can't remember), throwing grenades into rooms of a house...how can you do that? How do you do that without getting PID (positive identification)?" Jesus...Close quarters battle (CQB) is extremely dangerous and you have less time to react than a guy has to swing at a fastball, and this is life or death, not sports. You clear a room with shock and speed, not by slogging through the house like you want to buy it.
Another thing the questioner did was sneer at the way we are trained to identify hostile acts and hostile intent. The sergeant made a pretty good attempt at explaining it, but hey--that just wasn't good enough to this guy. The Iraqis know what to do, and that's what the Marine said--they know the deal. If something goes boom, and they get accosted by Americans, stop, show your hands, get on the ground, and allow yourself to be searched. They KNOW the deal. These guys--according to the sergeant--were stopped in a car a hundred meters from where the IED destroyed a vehicle, killing at least one initially and wounding others. He thought they were involved. At the time, radio-controlled IED's (RCIED's) were being used by insurgents in some parts of the country.
Anyway, they were ordered out of the car, and--according to the sergeant--attempted to flee. Yes, folks, that can constitute hostile intent. How?? This is how--they know to get down and be searched. If they flee they could be fleeing in order to fight another day. They are refusing to follow orders in this case, and therefore displaying hostile intent--the intent to not comply. I wasn't there, but this guy claims they ran. No one there at the time (that I am aware of) says anything different. You're going to indict the guy because everyone on the scene agrees? Wonderful...
These guys were ambushed and assaulted three houses they thought they received small arms fire from. In my opinion, from what I know of the incident, yeah, they overreacted. The smugness of this guy asking the questions was just vomit-worthy. Give the Marine some credit--he has a pair of solid brass swingers for even agreeing to do the interview, and he kept his cool throughout. But it just left a bad taste in my mouth, so I was motivated to go workout. Not like I was when "Cheryl" was running her mouth at me, but close. Anyway, other stuff is going on here...
Bush made a spot visit to Iraq today. His remarks were, um...I don't know, a little underwhelming, maybe. What the heck can he say at this point? He's desperate to back up his "Mission Accomplished" moment. This is so far gone from what they thought they accomplished; it's nothing like they thought it would ever be. It will never be what they thought they had created. It never was. It never could be. They have prepped the battlefield for the report next week to be delivered by GEN Petraeus. Oddly, he's delivering it with the US Ambassador here, but the White House is actually writing it. Am I the only one who thinks that is totally bizarre? With all the brainpower over here, they don't trust the man in charge to write the report, so the political hacks and cronies will write it for him; it gets presented as "his" report, and he takes the HEAT rounds for it from both sides. Yeah, a real profile in courage from the resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Just remember the old adage--believe half of what you see and none of what you hear.
So here are some more photos of T-walls I took in the last few days, and baby you can believe them:
This one was simple but really well done.
Here's a good one:
I love it because the Personnel Services Branch (PSB) unit here is all gung-ho and stuff. Definitely a lot of esprit de corps.
Here's another good one. I love the eagle holding the mailbag:
Even the postal company is keeping it real with the T-wall art. Here are a couple more:
Here's one from the MP unit that just rolled out of here:
These guys are down on Camp Striker:
Okay, time for bed for me. I'm beat. I'll be back at it soon. Next time I'll post pictures of one of the compounds here that used to be pretty nice before the war. See you later.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Don't believe the hype
Got this little gem from the New York Times edition of August 25th, 2007. It seems that the papers are finally starting to report on what motivates Iraqis to blow up American and Coalition forces. The gist of the story is that the surge is causing more Iraqis to be detained in Coalition-run prisons. The military has known this for some time now; I am just amazed that the so-called "Liberal News Media" hasn't call the Derelict in Chief on this:
"Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody are Sunni Arabs, the minority faction in Iraq that ruled the country under the government of Saddam Hussein; the other detainees are Shiites, the officers say...
"...[M]ilitary officers said that of the Sunni detainees, about 1,800 claim allegiance to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. About 6,000 more identify themselves as takfiris, or Muslims who believe some other Muslims are not true believers. Such believers view Shiite Muslims as heretics.
"Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order — a movement that drew from former Baath Party members and security officials who had served under Mr. Hussein — and has become religious and ideological.
"But the officers say an equally large number of Iraqi detainees say money is a significant reason they planted roadside bombs or shot at Iraqi and American-led forces.
“'Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government — the vast majority are inspired by money,' said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces’ detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. 'The primary motivator is economic — they’re angry men because they don’t have jobs,' he said. 'The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education.'
"But the detention system itself often serves as a breeding ground for the insurgency and a training opportunity for those who, after they are released, may attack Iraqi or American-led forces, military officers say.
"According to statistics supplied by the headquarters of Task Force 134, the American military unit in charge of detention operations in Iraq, there are about 280 detainees from countries other than Iraq. Of those, 55 are identified as Egyptian, 53 as Syrian, 37 as Saudi, 28 as Jordanian and 24 as Sudanese."
Where do I start? They Iraqi men are angry because they have no jobs? They are illiterate and unemployed? And we have KBR here, bringing in Pakistanis and Indians and others from all over the Third World, doing manual labor (for next to nothing) while the Iraqis have no jobs--in their own country? Wouldn't that make you a little bit angry? The unemployment rate in this country is over 40% but we import people to work at the bases. Maybe the locals would be more trustworthy and we wouldn't need to bring folks from other countries if they sensed that we were here to help them and not exploit them!
And even better--the American people are told that, "we're fighting them over here so we don't fight them at home." Of the 24,000 detainees in this country who are being held for attacking Coalition forces, Task Force 134 can positively identify exactly 280 that are non-Iraqi. Wonderful. We're going to this expense to fight the equivalent of two rifle companies over here. And--oh, by the way--we don't have any idea how many people are being held by the Iraqi government. "According to John Sifton, a researcher with Human Rights Watch...[T]he American military in Iraq will not provide numbers for detainees held by the government of Iraq.
“'The allegations of abuse are far worse for Iraqi facilities than for those detainees in U.S. custody,' he said. 'It is difficult to know the Iraqi detainee population. There are both official and unofficial Iraqi detention systems.'”
That is just peachy. This lying has got to stop, folks. Write your reps in Washington; I have. They can ignore us when we do it individually; they can't if we do it collectively. See ya 'round...
"Nearly 85 percent of the detainees in custody are Sunni Arabs, the minority faction in Iraq that ruled the country under the government of Saddam Hussein; the other detainees are Shiites, the officers say...
"...[M]ilitary officers said that of the Sunni detainees, about 1,800 claim allegiance to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a homegrown extremist group that American intelligence agencies have concluded is foreign-led. About 6,000 more identify themselves as takfiris, or Muslims who believe some other Muslims are not true believers. Such believers view Shiite Muslims as heretics.
"Those statistics would seem to indicate that the main inspiration of the hard-core Sunni insurgency is no longer a desire to restore the old order — a movement that drew from former Baath Party members and security officials who had served under Mr. Hussein — and has become religious and ideological.
"But the officers say an equally large number of Iraqi detainees say money is a significant reason they planted roadside bombs or shot at Iraqi and American-led forces.
“'Interestingly, we’ve found that the vast majority are not inspired by jihad or hate for the coalition or Iraqi government — the vast majority are inspired by money,' said Capt. John Fleming of the Navy, a spokesman for the multinational forces’ detainee operations. The men are paid by insurgent leaders. 'The primary motivator is economic — they’re angry men because they don’t have jobs,' he said. 'The detainee population is overwhelmingly illiterate and unemployed. Extremists have been very successful at spreading their ideology to economically strapped Iraqis with little to no formal education.'
"But the detention system itself often serves as a breeding ground for the insurgency and a training opportunity for those who, after they are released, may attack Iraqi or American-led forces, military officers say.
"According to statistics supplied by the headquarters of Task Force 134, the American military unit in charge of detention operations in Iraq, there are about 280 detainees from countries other than Iraq. Of those, 55 are identified as Egyptian, 53 as Syrian, 37 as Saudi, 28 as Jordanian and 24 as Sudanese."
Where do I start? They Iraqi men are angry because they have no jobs? They are illiterate and unemployed? And we have KBR here, bringing in Pakistanis and Indians and others from all over the Third World, doing manual labor (for next to nothing) while the Iraqis have no jobs--in their own country? Wouldn't that make you a little bit angry? The unemployment rate in this country is over 40% but we import people to work at the bases. Maybe the locals would be more trustworthy and we wouldn't need to bring folks from other countries if they sensed that we were here to help them and not exploit them!
And even better--the American people are told that, "we're fighting them over here so we don't fight them at home." Of the 24,000 detainees in this country who are being held for attacking Coalition forces, Task Force 134 can positively identify exactly 280 that are non-Iraqi. Wonderful. We're going to this expense to fight the equivalent of two rifle companies over here. And--oh, by the way--we don't have any idea how many people are being held by the Iraqi government. "According to John Sifton, a researcher with Human Rights Watch...[T]he American military in Iraq will not provide numbers for detainees held by the government of Iraq.
“'The allegations of abuse are far worse for Iraqi facilities than for those detainees in U.S. custody,' he said. 'It is difficult to know the Iraqi detainee population. There are both official and unofficial Iraqi detention systems.'”
That is just peachy. This lying has got to stop, folks. Write your reps in Washington; I have. They can ignore us when we do it individually; they can't if we do it collectively. See ya 'round...
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Almost forgot...
Yesterday, as a sign of progress in Iraq, insurgents blew up a pipeline leading to an oil refinery. This picture was taken in the afternoon after it had been burning for a few hours. I don't know how far away it was, but that is a very big plume of smoke...
This is the same plume of smoke as seen from a different location on the installation about 2 1/2 hours later:
+00009.jpg)
I heard last night at chow that it was a pipeline, but I wanted to wait until I saw that in the paper before I posted the pictures. This morning the sky was really obscured. I think it was probably the residual smoke.
This is the pond right next to where I took the last picture. That's a mosque to the right and an incomplete watch tower to the left. The watch tower was started by Saddam's people. I liked how still the water was...sometimes the geese swim in it.
+00004.jpg)
Okay---last but not least today, here are some Marine aviators getting ready for a mission...
This is the same plume of smoke as seen from a different location on the installation about 2 1/2 hours later:
+00009.jpg)
I heard last night at chow that it was a pipeline, but I wanted to wait until I saw that in the paper before I posted the pictures. This morning the sky was really obscured. I think it was probably the residual smoke.
This is the pond right next to where I took the last picture. That's a mosque to the right and an incomplete watch tower to the left. The watch tower was started by Saddam's people. I liked how still the water was...sometimes the geese swim in it.
+00004.jpg)
Okay---last but not least today, here are some Marine aviators getting ready for a mission...
Reality Check
Hey folks! It's been a few days since I posted...I hope the last post made you laugh a little. That's what it's all about--making it through this deployment with my ass and my sense of humor still intact. I'll keep everyone posted on any interesting developments or reactions. Maybe "Cheryl" will even grow some breasts, who knows. She definitely won't grow any testicles. But seriously, chickenhawks are scum. Bigtime scum.
So the White House is already starting to minimize expectations about the report on the surge here in Iraq. That can NOT be a good sign. I have felt for a long time that people like Casey and Petraeus were being set up as fall guys. The guys in uniform do what the guys in suits tell them to do. When the guy in the suit says, "The commanders on the ground determine the requirements, and they tell me they don't need more troops," what does that say to the commander who may have said that once but doesn't feel that way anymore? It tells him he needs to sit down and be quiet.
The president once said when Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head L. Paul Bremer was here that no one was requesting more troops. When Bremer leaves, he finally says that he requested 40,000 more troops during late 2003 or early 2004 and was told, "no." Don't hold me to the dates, I think that was the time frame; he left in June 2004 anyway, so it was no later than June 2004. But Bremer was a tool, anyway. God, the catastrophic mistakes that guy made by disbanding the Army and forced de-Ba'athification of the civil service. Those two blunders will be seen by historians as where this violent, intractable fiasco traces its roots to. Had things gone differently then I might not have ever been here to put this blog together. But here I am, and Bremer, four years after he did that, is back in the States living safely. And I bet it never weighs on his conscience, either.
Which brings me to an enabler for this disaster to continue. The president spoke at a convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) last week. War is good for business for these veterans groups, and I'll tell you what, business for them has been pretty good. It seems that anytime Bush wants to take a break from exploiting the uniformed military, the veterans groups call a conference so he can be the keynote speaker. Last week it was the VFW, next week it's the American Legion. I am more familiar with the Legion than the VFW because my Dad is involved in the Legion. Frankly, I think both of those groups are a bunch of bloodsuckers. What on earth are they trying to do? Do they think having some love-fest with a walking, talking, disaster of a man will draw in new members? Has direct mail gotten so expensive that they need to angle for free news coverage to drum up business? How pathetic; how sadly, horribly pathetic. And these are organizations that are supposed to be devoted to the continued welfare of the veteran!!! Jesus, with friends like that who needs enemies?
Another thing that angers me is the coverage. The so-called Liberal News Media just regurgitates his garbage with vacuous reporting. The story is, "Here's the president, and here's what he said, back to you, Katie," when they ought to be taking some time to digest what the statements being made really mean. I saw the Full Of eXcrement (FOX) News Channel report that he was comparing Vietnam to Iraq, and I said out loud, "Isn't it a little bit late for that?" Hey, I thought it was humorous, but some of the guys around me didn't. No one said anything. So Fox reports that, and the average Fox viewer agrees with the president. Most of the rest of the country doesn't buy the BS. But where is the "Liberal News Media?" If they are going to be called Liberal, they damn well ought to start acting Liberal, but they don't and they won't. They ought to have a headline story about how unwilling the president was to serve in Vietnam, and juxtapose that lack of service over his repeated admonitions that "there is tough work ahead." Hey, major combat operations were supposed to be over in May 2003. Why are there 20+ brigades of soldiers here now? I guess he was lying then, because I read the papers everyday and I never remember him saying that major combat operations had flared back up.
Really--what's up with that? Why isn't that moment of theater staged at taxpayer expense constantly being replayed on the news as a demonstration of how discredited this administration is? I see the tape of Bill Clinton saying he didn't have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky more often than I see the Mission Accomplished moment. And Bill Clinton's libido isn't responsible for 3,700+ dead soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. The first President Bush must be thoroughly ashamed of his son, considering how refused to drive on all the way to Baghdad in '91. What do they talk about at the cookout on the 4th of July? They sure can't talk current events.
The point I was originally trying to make, that these older veterans groups act as a stage for the exploitation of veterans, is important. Organizations represent people. It is assumed that an organization speaks for their membership. The president doesn't make speeches like the one he made last week on the steps of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He makes them where his handlers and puppeteers can manage the images and create their own reality. Spending time with the wounded and the families of the dead forces him to confront the truth that the rest of us see. No one represents the families of the fallen, and their grief is so private that no one should try. I hope that when folks see that the VFW or the Legion are buying into the BS, they recognize that the soldiers in the fight know what's going on. I have no interest in joining them, and if they ever make the mistake of calling my home or knocking on my door to get me to join, I will blast them so hard they'll wish they had never even seen my name. Anyway, onto more interesting things...
...like more T-wall art. I took these pictures today. Like I said, there are some very talented and creative people here on this installation. Take a look at these:
How would you like to have to drive this piece of equipment? It might get a little bit claustrophobic...
I love the sense of humor some people have. Look closely at the blade on the Stryker vehicle to the left...
Back to some T-walls...
The one kid died the day after Christmas...
And another one...
I'll post some more next time. See y'all in a little while.
So the White House is already starting to minimize expectations about the report on the surge here in Iraq. That can NOT be a good sign. I have felt for a long time that people like Casey and Petraeus were being set up as fall guys. The guys in uniform do what the guys in suits tell them to do. When the guy in the suit says, "The commanders on the ground determine the requirements, and they tell me they don't need more troops," what does that say to the commander who may have said that once but doesn't feel that way anymore? It tells him he needs to sit down and be quiet.
The president once said when Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) head L. Paul Bremer was here that no one was requesting more troops. When Bremer leaves, he finally says that he requested 40,000 more troops during late 2003 or early 2004 and was told, "no." Don't hold me to the dates, I think that was the time frame; he left in June 2004 anyway, so it was no later than June 2004. But Bremer was a tool, anyway. God, the catastrophic mistakes that guy made by disbanding the Army and forced de-Ba'athification of the civil service. Those two blunders will be seen by historians as where this violent, intractable fiasco traces its roots to. Had things gone differently then I might not have ever been here to put this blog together. But here I am, and Bremer, four years after he did that, is back in the States living safely. And I bet it never weighs on his conscience, either.
Which brings me to an enabler for this disaster to continue. The president spoke at a convention for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) last week. War is good for business for these veterans groups, and I'll tell you what, business for them has been pretty good. It seems that anytime Bush wants to take a break from exploiting the uniformed military, the veterans groups call a conference so he can be the keynote speaker. Last week it was the VFW, next week it's the American Legion. I am more familiar with the Legion than the VFW because my Dad is involved in the Legion. Frankly, I think both of those groups are a bunch of bloodsuckers. What on earth are they trying to do? Do they think having some love-fest with a walking, talking, disaster of a man will draw in new members? Has direct mail gotten so expensive that they need to angle for free news coverage to drum up business? How pathetic; how sadly, horribly pathetic. And these are organizations that are supposed to be devoted to the continued welfare of the veteran!!! Jesus, with friends like that who needs enemies?
Another thing that angers me is the coverage. The so-called Liberal News Media just regurgitates his garbage with vacuous reporting. The story is, "Here's the president, and here's what he said, back to you, Katie," when they ought to be taking some time to digest what the statements being made really mean. I saw the Full Of eXcrement (FOX) News Channel report that he was comparing Vietnam to Iraq, and I said out loud, "Isn't it a little bit late for that?" Hey, I thought it was humorous, but some of the guys around me didn't. No one said anything. So Fox reports that, and the average Fox viewer agrees with the president. Most of the rest of the country doesn't buy the BS. But where is the "Liberal News Media?" If they are going to be called Liberal, they damn well ought to start acting Liberal, but they don't and they won't. They ought to have a headline story about how unwilling the president was to serve in Vietnam, and juxtapose that lack of service over his repeated admonitions that "there is tough work ahead." Hey, major combat operations were supposed to be over in May 2003. Why are there 20+ brigades of soldiers here now? I guess he was lying then, because I read the papers everyday and I never remember him saying that major combat operations had flared back up.
Really--what's up with that? Why isn't that moment of theater staged at taxpayer expense constantly being replayed on the news as a demonstration of how discredited this administration is? I see the tape of Bill Clinton saying he didn't have sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky more often than I see the Mission Accomplished moment. And Bill Clinton's libido isn't responsible for 3,700+ dead soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. The first President Bush must be thoroughly ashamed of his son, considering how refused to drive on all the way to Baghdad in '91. What do they talk about at the cookout on the 4th of July? They sure can't talk current events.
The point I was originally trying to make, that these older veterans groups act as a stage for the exploitation of veterans, is important. Organizations represent people. It is assumed that an organization speaks for their membership. The president doesn't make speeches like the one he made last week on the steps of Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He makes them where his handlers and puppeteers can manage the images and create their own reality. Spending time with the wounded and the families of the dead forces him to confront the truth that the rest of us see. No one represents the families of the fallen, and their grief is so private that no one should try. I hope that when folks see that the VFW or the Legion are buying into the BS, they recognize that the soldiers in the fight know what's going on. I have no interest in joining them, and if they ever make the mistake of calling my home or knocking on my door to get me to join, I will blast them so hard they'll wish they had never even seen my name. Anyway, onto more interesting things...
...like more T-wall art. I took these pictures today. Like I said, there are some very talented and creative people here on this installation. Take a look at these:
How would you like to have to drive this piece of equipment? It might get a little bit claustrophobic...
I love the sense of humor some people have. Look closely at the blade on the Stryker vehicle to the left...
Back to some T-walls...
The one kid died the day after Christmas...
And another one...
I'll post some more next time. See y'all in a little while.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
More of the same...
Hello from Baghdad, where today it was 114 degrees, and man did it feel like it. Whew. I was out doing my thing and decided to take some more pictures. By the time I got back to the office it was after 1:00 pm and I was just totally smoked. My PT suffered tonight as a result. It was hard to get motivated and I reached muscle failure pretty early.
My PT has been a good news/ bad news story. I am building muscle, but I'm not burning fat quickly enough. I weighed myself tonight and I'm 185 lbs. My goal at the start of this deployment was to get down to 169. I'm definitely going in the wrong direction, but that's not hard to do here. The amount of food they serve here is just out of control. You have to tell them to slow down on what they dump on your plate or before you know it you're working a 4,000-calorie diet each day. I took a "before" picture a couple of weeks ago; if I hit my target I'll post them side by side so people can see the difference. If I don't hit my target weight, all photos will get quietly and permanently deleted...
So one of my last posts dealt with chickenhawks. They are a subspecies of that most disgusting of contemporary animals, the Cowardlius Republicanus. Well. I have an acquaintance, a guy I'll call "Cheryl," who is the poster child for this kind of animal.
Wait--I know what you're thinking..."Pat, you said that this is a dude but he's got a chick's name. What's going on?"
Very observant. This person was born male, but only grew to be half a man, hence the chick's name. It's not "his" real name anyway. She knows who she is. Anyway, I'm digressing...back to the story.
So I'm here, in a war zone, where soldiers aren't shooting at paper targets so they can feel good about themselves, they're shooting at bad guys (who are shooting back, by the way) in order to save their ass. This chick thinks it's funny to quote Democrats who were equally gutless and didn't fight to keep the president from invading this country four years ago. You know what I mean--the ones who said junk like, "Saddam Hussein, bad bad man, needs to be removed from power, etc.," mostly during the year prior to the invasion. Oddly, she never mentions the times Bush and Cheney expound at length about why invading Iraq and destroying the Hussein government is such a bad idea. She gets selective amnesia about how Bush and his cohorts, seven short years ago, would sneer at the idea of nation-building (exactly what we're doing right here, right now). But hey, that's to be expected. Nation-building sucks; nation-building when Kellog, Brown, and Root (KBR) is performing the work under non-competitive contracts--buddy, that's called a retirement account when you leave office.
Damn it, I'm digressing again. Anyway, "Cheryl" is sending these silly f***ing e-mails, just peppering my inbox with 'em. I'm like, screw it, she'll get bored and start playing with dolls--sorry, poseable action figures--again anytime now. I go work out, go hit the showers, and go to bed. That was Tuesday night. So I'm sitting here in my office yesterday afternoon, about to go to chow, and she starts sending them AGAIN! I'm like, Jesus Christ, is this chick stalking me? Like, I'm done with this whole business, I actually have a war going on here that sort of has my attention, and this woman is still going at it. She wouldn't serve when it was her chance--in Vietnam, where lots of women served--but she'll put on the cheerleader's outfit, wave the pom-poms, and enthusiastically send other people's kids off to war. She just wouldn't let it go.
Well, yesterday was the wrong day for that kind of junk; we had incoming here that was a little unnerving, and 14 soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the hills up north. 14 soldiers who had hopes and dreams to go back to after the Army. 14 people who had families that were worried every minute they were here, and friends, and all of them now are beside themselves with grief that this chick "Cheryl" will never, ever know. And she just keeps sending this garbage. Not only is it immature for a woman approaching retirement age to do something like that, it's just downright disrespectful. So I told her to show some respect for the dead and knock it off. Tell me--what do you think was the response? Was it (a) silence, or was it (b) more verbal diarrhea? If you selected (b) give yourself a chuck on the shoulder and a 20 oz. bottle of red Gatorade from the Dining Facility (the DFAC, pronounced "dee-fack").
I was just enraged. It definitely motivated me for my workout after dinner (think Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear"). You know, it must really suck to be like "Cheryl." I mean, having to go through life, masquerading as the tough girl when the seminal event of her generation is a war; you know, the time when someone who wants to play the tough girl can actually play the tough girl, and she passes it up. Okay, fine--so she chose to Park in College for a few years until things cooled off; whatever, lots of other people did the same thing. They just didn't come out of the experience with such an abundance of self-loathing that they decided the only way to feel better about avoiding the war was to cheer for other wars to start so that they could act tough with their friends. Again, it must suck to carry that kind of shame. But I wouldn't know--my country called and I answered. The person calling the shots this time happens to be a dangerously ignorant, semi-retarded chickenhawk like "Cheryl," but I think that's why she loves the guy so much. They were cut from the same bolt of cloth.
It's the same kind of cloth used for diapers.
But am I bitter? Nah...why be bitter?
I'll be blogging at you later, so stay tuned...lots of interesting things go on here every day, and I'll be back to tell you about 'em. Thanks for reading.
My PT has been a good news/ bad news story. I am building muscle, but I'm not burning fat quickly enough. I weighed myself tonight and I'm 185 lbs. My goal at the start of this deployment was to get down to 169. I'm definitely going in the wrong direction, but that's not hard to do here. The amount of food they serve here is just out of control. You have to tell them to slow down on what they dump on your plate or before you know it you're working a 4,000-calorie diet each day. I took a "before" picture a couple of weeks ago; if I hit my target I'll post them side by side so people can see the difference. If I don't hit my target weight, all photos will get quietly and permanently deleted...
So one of my last posts dealt with chickenhawks. They are a subspecies of that most disgusting of contemporary animals, the Cowardlius Republicanus. Well. I have an acquaintance, a guy I'll call "Cheryl," who is the poster child for this kind of animal.
Wait--I know what you're thinking..."Pat, you said that this is a dude but he's got a chick's name. What's going on?"
Very observant. This person was born male, but only grew to be half a man, hence the chick's name. It's not "his" real name anyway. She knows who she is. Anyway, I'm digressing...back to the story.
So I'm here, in a war zone, where soldiers aren't shooting at paper targets so they can feel good about themselves, they're shooting at bad guys (who are shooting back, by the way) in order to save their ass. This chick thinks it's funny to quote Democrats who were equally gutless and didn't fight to keep the president from invading this country four years ago. You know what I mean--the ones who said junk like, "Saddam Hussein, bad bad man, needs to be removed from power, etc.," mostly during the year prior to the invasion. Oddly, she never mentions the times Bush and Cheney expound at length about why invading Iraq and destroying the Hussein government is such a bad idea. She gets selective amnesia about how Bush and his cohorts, seven short years ago, would sneer at the idea of nation-building (exactly what we're doing right here, right now). But hey, that's to be expected. Nation-building sucks; nation-building when Kellog, Brown, and Root (KBR) is performing the work under non-competitive contracts--buddy, that's called a retirement account when you leave office.
Damn it, I'm digressing again. Anyway, "Cheryl" is sending these silly f***ing e-mails, just peppering my inbox with 'em. I'm like, screw it, she'll get bored and start playing with dolls--sorry, poseable action figures--again anytime now. I go work out, go hit the showers, and go to bed. That was Tuesday night. So I'm sitting here in my office yesterday afternoon, about to go to chow, and she starts sending them AGAIN! I'm like, Jesus Christ, is this chick stalking me? Like, I'm done with this whole business, I actually have a war going on here that sort of has my attention, and this woman is still going at it. She wouldn't serve when it was her chance--in Vietnam, where lots of women served--but she'll put on the cheerleader's outfit, wave the pom-poms, and enthusiastically send other people's kids off to war. She just wouldn't let it go.
Well, yesterday was the wrong day for that kind of junk; we had incoming here that was a little unnerving, and 14 soldiers died in a helicopter crash in the hills up north. 14 soldiers who had hopes and dreams to go back to after the Army. 14 people who had families that were worried every minute they were here, and friends, and all of them now are beside themselves with grief that this chick "Cheryl" will never, ever know. And she just keeps sending this garbage. Not only is it immature for a woman approaching retirement age to do something like that, it's just downright disrespectful. So I told her to show some respect for the dead and knock it off. Tell me--what do you think was the response? Was it (a) silence, or was it (b) more verbal diarrhea? If you selected (b) give yourself a chuck on the shoulder and a 20 oz. bottle of red Gatorade from the Dining Facility (the DFAC, pronounced "dee-fack").
I was just enraged. It definitely motivated me for my workout after dinner (think Robert De Niro in "Cape Fear"). You know, it must really suck to be like "Cheryl." I mean, having to go through life, masquerading as the tough girl when the seminal event of her generation is a war; you know, the time when someone who wants to play the tough girl can actually play the tough girl, and she passes it up. Okay, fine--so she chose to Park in College for a few years until things cooled off; whatever, lots of other people did the same thing. They just didn't come out of the experience with such an abundance of self-loathing that they decided the only way to feel better about avoiding the war was to cheer for other wars to start so that they could act tough with their friends. Again, it must suck to carry that kind of shame. But I wouldn't know--my country called and I answered. The person calling the shots this time happens to be a dangerously ignorant, semi-retarded chickenhawk like "Cheryl," but I think that's why she loves the guy so much. They were cut from the same bolt of cloth.
It's the same kind of cloth used for diapers.
But am I bitter? Nah...why be bitter?
I'll be blogging at you later, so stay tuned...lots of interesting things go on here every day, and I'll be back to tell you about 'em. Thanks for reading.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Question
Before I forget--When Chuck Norris gets drunk, he doesn't throw up, he throws down!
Okay then...
Is there anything worse in this world than someone who would expect others to do what they themselves are unwilling to do?
Is there anything in this world worthy of less respect than a coward?
In my opinion, no. Cowardice comes in many forms. I chose, 18 years ago this past March, to enlist in the Maryland Army National Guard as a Private. It was 1989. The Soviet Union was still a country. They had been forced to leave Afghanistan my mid-1988, and it seemed that they were weakened but by no means as weak as they would become. There was no hot war involving the US at that time, but the Cold War was still very much alive and well.
I chose to join the Guard primarily for money to use for college. As an infantryman, I was trained to fight the nation's wars, not study. I knew that at some point I could be called upon to fight, but let's face it, in 1989 the Guard was seen as a strategic reserve force, not the operational reserve it is today. While possible, the likelihood of mobilization for war then seemed pretty remote.
Within two years of my enlistment, we invaded Panama, Kuwait, and southern Iraq. The Soviet Union, for all intents and purposes, imploded and ceased being a conventional military threat to Western Europe. Hearing that term these days, "Western Europe," brings back memories of when Europe actually was divided between East and West. If you didn't live at that time, it's a hard concept to really relate the full flavor of what it was like. Bottom line, the world changed dramatically and a lot of amazing and important things happened in a very, very short period of time.
But I stayed in. I was offered a shot at Officer Candidate School which I took, and became a commissioned officer in the Maryland Guard in 1994. Still, even with the increase of OPTEMPO for the active component, the Guard was seen as a strategic reserve--break glass and use in case of war; otherwise leave it on the shelf. But we still trained for war. When March 1995 rolled around, had I remained enlisted, I could have ETS'ed (allowed my enlistment to expire and get out) but I didn't. I didn't because I enjoyed being in the Guard and I felt that it was important to be ready to defend our country. It would have been really easy to leave; hell, nothing really was going on that was incredibly violent with regard to the deployment of ground forces. We had peacekeeping missions all over the world, notably in Bosnia, but these weren't "hot" wars. Bosnia had the ability to flare up and get violent, but it never did to any appreciable degree after the Dayton Accords of 1995.
So here comes September 11. Within the first few months after that event, in the Guard you had a pretty clear choice: either stay in and risk getting mobilized and deployed somewhere, or finish your service and move on. Some of my more conservative friends chose the latter course. Whatever. I mean, there just aren't a whole lot of flaming liberals like myself in the military anyway, which is frankly disappointing, but that's another discussion for another day. But with the guys I hung with in the Guard, I was pretty surprised how many thought invading Iraq was the right thing to do. These were educated, company-grade officers.
When my unit was mobilized to go to Andrews AFB in January 2003 to augment the Air Force Security Forces unit there, the men got separated from the boys to a degree. Those who were unable to deploy because of physical problems (but the Guard had carried, anyway) couldn't go with us. Some were more or less put out, or allowed to ETS and not brought back. Some of the officers I knew who were cheerleaders for the administration suddenly realized that they might actually have to back up all the bluster and B.S. I was really surprised when a close friend of mine, who was a supporter of invading Iraq, got excused from the deployment and subsequently resigned his commission. I was pretty stunned. He was a good guy, but this is what he turned out to be when it counted:
I think what he told me was, and I am paraphrasing, that if he got mobilized (on that deployment) he would have to leave law school in the middle of the year, it would set him back with getting internships, he wouldn't be able to pay off his loans because he wouldn't be able to get the job he wanted, etc. Again, for a supporter of the war in the first place I was pretty surprised to hear him put it like that. I was like, damn, he's not even trying to rationalize it, he's just telling it flat out.
Well, he wasn't the only person I knew like that in the Guard. Their numbers started to thin as each new deployment came up. Until December 2004 they were pretty much CONUS, or Continental United States, deployments. in December 2004 we mobilized a rifle company to come to Iraq. Again, another round of should I stay/should I go with some people. Not with me. I still wanted to serve my country, even if it meant deploying in support of a complete fiasco like this one.
So now I'm getting to my main points--what kind of person asks sacrifice of others when he/she is unwilling to make that same sacrifice? And is there anything worse than being a total coward? I can now answer both questions. The kind of person who expects others to be willing to die for his country when, as a young, able-bodied student he stayed in college and declined to serve is a low form of life, indeed. There are many names for people like this--wuss, chicken hawk, punk...choose your favorite. We all know people like this; sometimes we realize it, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we assume that the guy standing next to us with a beer in his hand, talking a good game and dizzy with testosterone, has served in the military. maybe it's his love of guns; maybe it's his interest in military history. Heck, maybe it's because when he talks military stuff to you and he says, "A friend of mine who was in the Special Forces in Vietnam told me..." you want to believe that the person is a patriot; you want to believe he's a warrior.
Well folks, someone I know talks a very, very good game. But that's all he's got--all talk, no game. When his country needed him, this is what he turned out to be:
And that's quite a shame. It's a shame that chicken hawks survived the Vietnam War and 58,000+ patriots were sent to their deaths. In my opinion that is what's happening here in Iraq. The guys from the last war (see above) are feeding these guys into the meat grinder:
The punks from the Vietnam generation are trying to redeem themselves with the blood of the lions, the warriors, of this nation's youth. How does it feel to be half a man? How pitiful is someone so filled with self-loathing that they strain to bask in the reflected glory of those of us who do risk our lives, who will go to war when told to do so, who live the Army Values? What does one really feel, when looking in the mirror, when they realize that this nation needed them and they were too selfish or cowardly or weak to answer the call? If they use that experience to become more judicious in their call for military action (or renounce military action totally), I say they have earned a measure of my respect. If they become old, selfish, embittered, and lonely souls, devoid of self-respect and the respect of others, I say they got what they deserve. I'll drink a beer and smoke a cigar with a pacifist any day of the week because their philosophy is consistent. I turn my back and feel contempt for the ones who act as cheerleaders for this administration who never served in uniform themselves. Their children will be the ones putting the pieces back together. And some of their children are going to die.
OUT
Okay then...
Is there anything worse in this world than someone who would expect others to do what they themselves are unwilling to do?
Is there anything in this world worthy of less respect than a coward?
In my opinion, no. Cowardice comes in many forms. I chose, 18 years ago this past March, to enlist in the Maryland Army National Guard as a Private. It was 1989. The Soviet Union was still a country. They had been forced to leave Afghanistan my mid-1988, and it seemed that they were weakened but by no means as weak as they would become. There was no hot war involving the US at that time, but the Cold War was still very much alive and well.
I chose to join the Guard primarily for money to use for college. As an infantryman, I was trained to fight the nation's wars, not study. I knew that at some point I could be called upon to fight, but let's face it, in 1989 the Guard was seen as a strategic reserve force, not the operational reserve it is today. While possible, the likelihood of mobilization for war then seemed pretty remote.
Within two years of my enlistment, we invaded Panama, Kuwait, and southern Iraq. The Soviet Union, for all intents and purposes, imploded and ceased being a conventional military threat to Western Europe. Hearing that term these days, "Western Europe," brings back memories of when Europe actually was divided between East and West. If you didn't live at that time, it's a hard concept to really relate the full flavor of what it was like. Bottom line, the world changed dramatically and a lot of amazing and important things happened in a very, very short period of time.
But I stayed in. I was offered a shot at Officer Candidate School which I took, and became a commissioned officer in the Maryland Guard in 1994. Still, even with the increase of OPTEMPO for the active component, the Guard was seen as a strategic reserve--break glass and use in case of war; otherwise leave it on the shelf. But we still trained for war. When March 1995 rolled around, had I remained enlisted, I could have ETS'ed (allowed my enlistment to expire and get out) but I didn't. I didn't because I enjoyed being in the Guard and I felt that it was important to be ready to defend our country. It would have been really easy to leave; hell, nothing really was going on that was incredibly violent with regard to the deployment of ground forces. We had peacekeeping missions all over the world, notably in Bosnia, but these weren't "hot" wars. Bosnia had the ability to flare up and get violent, but it never did to any appreciable degree after the Dayton Accords of 1995.
So here comes September 11. Within the first few months after that event, in the Guard you had a pretty clear choice: either stay in and risk getting mobilized and deployed somewhere, or finish your service and move on. Some of my more conservative friends chose the latter course. Whatever. I mean, there just aren't a whole lot of flaming liberals like myself in the military anyway, which is frankly disappointing, but that's another discussion for another day. But with the guys I hung with in the Guard, I was pretty surprised how many thought invading Iraq was the right thing to do. These were educated, company-grade officers.
When my unit was mobilized to go to Andrews AFB in January 2003 to augment the Air Force Security Forces unit there, the men got separated from the boys to a degree. Those who were unable to deploy because of physical problems (but the Guard had carried, anyway) couldn't go with us. Some were more or less put out, or allowed to ETS and not brought back. Some of the officers I knew who were cheerleaders for the administration suddenly realized that they might actually have to back up all the bluster and B.S. I was really surprised when a close friend of mine, who was a supporter of invading Iraq, got excused from the deployment and subsequently resigned his commission. I was pretty stunned. He was a good guy, but this is what he turned out to be when it counted:
I think what he told me was, and I am paraphrasing, that if he got mobilized (on that deployment) he would have to leave law school in the middle of the year, it would set him back with getting internships, he wouldn't be able to pay off his loans because he wouldn't be able to get the job he wanted, etc. Again, for a supporter of the war in the first place I was pretty surprised to hear him put it like that. I was like, damn, he's not even trying to rationalize it, he's just telling it flat out.
Well, he wasn't the only person I knew like that in the Guard. Their numbers started to thin as each new deployment came up. Until December 2004 they were pretty much CONUS, or Continental United States, deployments. in December 2004 we mobilized a rifle company to come to Iraq. Again, another round of should I stay/should I go with some people. Not with me. I still wanted to serve my country, even if it meant deploying in support of a complete fiasco like this one.
So now I'm getting to my main points--what kind of person asks sacrifice of others when he/she is unwilling to make that same sacrifice? And is there anything worse than being a total coward? I can now answer both questions. The kind of person who expects others to be willing to die for his country when, as a young, able-bodied student he stayed in college and declined to serve is a low form of life, indeed. There are many names for people like this--wuss, chicken hawk, punk...choose your favorite. We all know people like this; sometimes we realize it, sometimes we don't. Sometimes we assume that the guy standing next to us with a beer in his hand, talking a good game and dizzy with testosterone, has served in the military. maybe it's his love of guns; maybe it's his interest in military history. Heck, maybe it's because when he talks military stuff to you and he says, "A friend of mine who was in the Special Forces in Vietnam told me..." you want to believe that the person is a patriot; you want to believe he's a warrior.
Well folks, someone I know talks a very, very good game. But that's all he's got--all talk, no game. When his country needed him, this is what he turned out to be:
And that's quite a shame. It's a shame that chicken hawks survived the Vietnam War and 58,000+ patriots were sent to their deaths. In my opinion that is what's happening here in Iraq. The guys from the last war (see above) are feeding these guys into the meat grinder:
The punks from the Vietnam generation are trying to redeem themselves with the blood of the lions, the warriors, of this nation's youth. How does it feel to be half a man? How pitiful is someone so filled with self-loathing that they strain to bask in the reflected glory of those of us who do risk our lives, who will go to war when told to do so, who live the Army Values? What does one really feel, when looking in the mirror, when they realize that this nation needed them and they were too selfish or cowardly or weak to answer the call? If they use that experience to become more judicious in their call for military action (or renounce military action totally), I say they have earned a measure of my respect. If they become old, selfish, embittered, and lonely souls, devoid of self-respect and the respect of others, I say they got what they deserve. I'll drink a beer and smoke a cigar with a pacifist any day of the week because their philosophy is consistent. I turn my back and feel contempt for the ones who act as cheerleaders for this administration who never served in uniform themselves. Their children will be the ones putting the pieces back together. And some of their children are going to die.
OUT
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
More cool pictures
Here are a few pictures I took this afternoon--more T-wall Art. Cool stuff. These were around a medical unit here on Camp Victory.
Got some real talented people that come through here.
I have lots of other pictures depicting the daily life of units here. Over the course of the next 8 months I'll post the interesting ones.
OUT
Got some real talented people that come through here.
I have lots of other pictures depicting the daily life of units here. Over the course of the next 8 months I'll post the interesting ones.
OUT
Mixed bag
Hey guys! Not much going on here that doesn't happen on a daily basis. Spent this weekend working. Spent last week working. I'll definitely spend this week working. Like I said, Same thing going on.
So what I do in my own time is what keeps my mind sharp and keeps me loose. A few weeks ago we had some comedians do a show up on Camp Liberty. They were pretty good, the typical "blue" comedy you'd expect, but they were pretty funny. One of the jokes one dude dropped was that Kuwait isn't a country it's a button on a microwave. That's a fact. The birds down there hunker down in the shade during the day and their mouths are wide open, like they're gasping for air. It was a funny observation if you've been there and experienced it. When I went to get my hair cut it was so hot outside that they would hit you with a blow dryer that blew cool air in order to dry the sweat on your head. THAT is hot!
So when we were in Kuwait, like I said, it is just like being inside an oven, with a fan blowing hot air on you. There is no indoor plumbing in the transient tent areas--every drop of water used in the camp gets trucked in. So guess what that means--porta johns. Yep, plastic chemical toilets left out in the sun to simmer. They had these small hard-stand kind of toilets, but they stunk even worse than the porta johns. You go in there and you better don your M40 protective mask, and they didn't have lights. So anyway, you're in these porta johns just trying to get it done to minimize your time inside, and people would find the time to write some pretty entertaining graffiti. At Camp Buehring there is great appreciation for Chuck Norris. Not just his body of work on film or on television, but for the principles for which he stands: truth, justice, and The American Way. There is a website everyone who reads this blog should visit: http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com
Some of my favorite entries:
--Chuck Norris sleeps with a pillow under his gun;
--Chuck Norris is suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs;
--There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist;
--CNN was originally created as the "Chuck Norris Network" to update Americans with on-the-spot ass-kicking in real time;
--Chuck Norris' calendar runs from 2 April to 31 March. No one fools Chuck Norris;
--Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink;
--Chuck Norris uses pepper spray to spice up his steaks;
--Chuck Norris is the only human being to display the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- you can never know both exactly where and how quickly he will roundhouse-kick you in the face;
--Chuck Norris can hit you so hard that he can actually alter your DNA. Decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell "What The Hell was That?"
Okay, last one...
--Chuck Norris once ate a whole cake before his friends could tell him there was a stripper in it.
NOPE!!! One more...
--How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could Chuck Norris? ...All of it.
When you're sitting in a plastic box that's so hot it could melt just trying to get 'er done and go back inside the tent, this stuff makes you laugh out loud. Check out the website.
The last thing I wanted to do today was show some pictures of what I call "T-wall art." T-walls are the concrete slabs that stand up and protect buildings, tents, and containerized housing units (CHU's) from shrapnel and small arms fire. It's not uncommon to see them decorated by units that come through here with unit crests and so on. Camp Buehring was fat with the painted ones. I've found some pretty good ones here that people ought to see, so here are a few:
Time for me to do other things. thanks for coming by.
So what I do in my own time is what keeps my mind sharp and keeps me loose. A few weeks ago we had some comedians do a show up on Camp Liberty. They were pretty good, the typical "blue" comedy you'd expect, but they were pretty funny. One of the jokes one dude dropped was that Kuwait isn't a country it's a button on a microwave. That's a fact. The birds down there hunker down in the shade during the day and their mouths are wide open, like they're gasping for air. It was a funny observation if you've been there and experienced it. When I went to get my hair cut it was so hot outside that they would hit you with a blow dryer that blew cool air in order to dry the sweat on your head. THAT is hot!
So when we were in Kuwait, like I said, it is just like being inside an oven, with a fan blowing hot air on you. There is no indoor plumbing in the transient tent areas--every drop of water used in the camp gets trucked in. So guess what that means--porta johns. Yep, plastic chemical toilets left out in the sun to simmer. They had these small hard-stand kind of toilets, but they stunk even worse than the porta johns. You go in there and you better don your M40 protective mask, and they didn't have lights. So anyway, you're in these porta johns just trying to get it done to minimize your time inside, and people would find the time to write some pretty entertaining graffiti. At Camp Buehring there is great appreciation for Chuck Norris. Not just his body of work on film or on television, but for the principles for which he stands: truth, justice, and The American Way. There is a website everyone who reads this blog should visit: http://www.chucknorrisfacts.com
Some of my favorite entries:
--Chuck Norris sleeps with a pillow under his gun;
--Chuck Norris is suing NBC, claiming Law and Order are trademarked names for his left and right legs;
--There is no chin behind Chuck Norris' beard. There is only another fist;
--CNN was originally created as the "Chuck Norris Network" to update Americans with on-the-spot ass-kicking in real time;
--Chuck Norris' calendar runs from 2 April to 31 March. No one fools Chuck Norris;
--Chuck Norris can lead a horse to water AND make it drink;
--Chuck Norris uses pepper spray to spice up his steaks;
--Chuck Norris is the only human being to display the Heisenberg uncertainty principle -- you can never know both exactly where and how quickly he will roundhouse-kick you in the face;
--Chuck Norris can hit you so hard that he can actually alter your DNA. Decades from now your descendants will occasionally clutch their heads and yell "What The Hell was That?"
Okay, last one...
--Chuck Norris once ate a whole cake before his friends could tell him there was a stripper in it.
NOPE!!! One more...
--How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could Chuck Norris? ...All of it.
When you're sitting in a plastic box that's so hot it could melt just trying to get 'er done and go back inside the tent, this stuff makes you laugh out loud. Check out the website.
The last thing I wanted to do today was show some pictures of what I call "T-wall art." T-walls are the concrete slabs that stand up and protect buildings, tents, and containerized housing units (CHU's) from shrapnel and small arms fire. It's not uncommon to see them decorated by units that come through here with unit crests and so on. Camp Buehring was fat with the painted ones. I've found some pretty good ones here that people ought to see, so here are a few:
Time for me to do other things. thanks for coming by.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)