Freelance war correspondent Michael Yon doesn't explain the use of this teepee in Afghanistan except to say that it's a memorial to an American unit's war dead. MY's apparently in need of money to continue. He's still worth it. I'm still sending him some. You should too. (Uh, actually he does explain the teepee. The unit is the 2nd ID, the "Indian Head" division.)
Mr. B.'s big item for his and Mrs. Charm's secular Christmas celebration was Guitar Hero. When he's older he may find the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns more enlightening. Fortunately there'll be more available than the usual anti-American, anti-war movies that Hollyweird churns out:
Video "game makers aren't afraid to put players in situations where U.S. soldiers are unambiguously the good guys, while the combatants – often Muslims – are the bad guys."
Via Instapundit.
Re our secular Christmas at the rancho: This celebration of parties, presents and poinsettias has more to do with Saturnalia than Christianity. It is far older than the religious version. (Some nineteenth century Protestants found it so unnerving that they took to assuring their fellows that while they did mark the Nativity they did "not worship the tree.")
Christians still confuse the two, some of them whacking the secular version as ungodly. Well, to each his own. Mrs. C. would be lost without her favorite time of the year. And while he long ago graduated from Santa to understanding who the real gift-givers are, Mr. B. likewise would be bereft without packages to unwrap and goodies to consume. Good thing they needn't be.
Link via Power Line.
The case of Army Master Sergeant and milblogger C.J. Grisham doesn't surprise me. He's in a public dispute with his child's public school in Huntsville, AL, and his command has failed to back him. They were already irritated at his public criticism of Barry's presidential fitness and needling of the Democrat Party.
The Army is a top-down organization and active-duty milbloggers like Grisham walk a fine line between free speech and insubordination. Tits on a boar, I say. If the Army wanted soldiers to have blogs, they'd be issued them. But other milbloggers disagree and they have gone silent through Friday to protest Grisham's situation, which is extensively explained here. Whatever they say in public, I'm sure that's what the Army would prefer active-duty milbloggers do: Go silent. Permanently.
I've said it before, if we're going to dither, we should leave Afghanistan immediately. The government is more corrupt than the one in Iraq (and that's saying something) and the Afghans don't seem to want to fight. (Reminds me of South Vietnam.) We can always go back if we have to, or leave a few spec-ops behind to direct any necessary smart-bombings.
But Barry's new half-in, half-out strategy is pathetic. Especially his setting of a timetable for departure, which will only serve to put the Taliban and Al Q on notice that they can do all the free-killing of American troops they desire in the meantime. President Pantywaist has done the next worst thing to failing to decide at all. "America – we are passing through a time of great trial." No kidding. Will the last soldier out of the GWOT please close the door? Meanwhile, keep your heads down out there.
UPDATE: Military analyst Ralph Peters agrees: "Our president is setting up our military to fail." Yep and, meanwhile, sending the enemy more American targets to shoot at.
It never gets this cold in Cuero, southeast of Austin, but these boys are headed to altitude in open cockpits. Taken at the former Cuero Army Air Field in 1942 when this was basic pilot training. I do not subscribe to the "greatest generation" baloney, which I think mainly scorns Korea and Vietnam veterans, but it's for sure these guys had to deal with some fairly primitive technology. They were just lucky to have the almost complete backing of the whole country during their war.
That's a more loaded question than it may appear. Depends on how you define what happened there. Was it a massacre in the war on terror? Then they get Purple Hearts. Or was it a lone wacko's criminal act? in which case, they don't.
Fellow OCS grad Tucker Smallwood, who I have known and argued with since college days, opined the other day on our class email list that Barry should withdraw all the regulars while sending in the advisers, accompanied by air, artillery and medevac. Just as he and I did it in Viet Nam. I agreed but, probably, for different reasons.
I also see no reason to keep regulars in that briar patch with the Taliban tar baby but, moreover, I suspect Barry is going to be another LBJ, as this indicates, another micromanager all the way to defeat. The worst problem of course is that we're really there for us, not for them. And they don't want to fight in sufficient numbers to make advising worth while. But we could just go back now and then to clean out the Taliban rat's nest. Annually, if necessary. It would certainly be cheaper in money and American lives.
If I see another headline about "the tragedy" at Fort Hood, I will vomit. It was a massacre, a terrorist attack, an example of "going Muslim" on Christians and Jews and other non-Muslims by a religious-fanatic murderer. Not some put-upon, discriminated-against, sad sack we must now feel sorry for. Piss on you, Maj. Hasan, and all your fellow-travelers.
The sorrow of the loved ones of the dead and maimed is real. But the old media manipulates us with their canned sorrow, no less than the politicians who can turn it on and off like a faucet. They couldn't care less. Most of them never served and never will. Their buddy Barry, who also never served, will come to Fort Hood today to give his version of canned sorrow. He should, instead, lead by undermining the political correctness and bureaucratic cowardice and inertia that caused this travesty. But he won't. It got him elected, after all.
UPDATE: President Pantywaist came, he saw, and he coddled. Hasan may have cracked from "stress."
The generals don't want it, but, then, they can't do the basics, either:
"The Army is so worn out and so politically correct it could not spot something seriously amiss in a major who dressed like an Arab on base even though he was American-born and bred. His openly expressed opposition to American policy in the Middle East should have gotten him cashiered, but didn’t."
And while we're at it, how about a new Congress?
So the murderous major tried to contact Al Q, eh? It's really not reassuring to think that our own military may be shot through with terrorist sympathizers like him, whose activities their commands and outside intelligence agencies know about, but for reasons of political correctness decline to deter. Now we know what the FBI's standard "this is not terrorism" claim is really worth.
GWB and Laura quietly visit the wounded at Fort Hood. While Barry and Michele, neither of whom have much love for the country, much less its military, and show it time and again, continue to par-tay.
Via My Voice On The Wings of Change.
Take it from one who knows. So the dimwit media, trying to obfuscate and excuse the Muslim major's murderous fling at Jihad, are just taking you and every other sucker down the garden path to stupidity. Grow up and realize that there really are traitors in our midst and this kind of nonsense only strengthens them.
UPDATE: It may be too late. Our society may already be too sick to survive.
Via Lone Star Times.
Want to help?
Chaplain's Fund Office
Bldg 44, 761st Tank Battalion Ave.
Fort Hood, TX 76544-5000
Checks should be made payable to COTF (Chapel's Tithes and Offerings Fund) with a note on the memo line stating "Nov. 5 Tragedy."
While our military, media and feds fall over themselves trying to pretend they have no idea why Maj. Hasan would murder and cripple 43 people, a Brit newspaper finds another supposedly-missing link to Jihad. Gee, what a surprise.
UPDATE: At least one national pol has the common sense to draw the logical conclusion.
Letting Army Maj. (and Fort Hood Jihadi) Hasan harm his PTSD and brain-injury patients is despicable:
"I will argue that political correctness led to the madness of having someone who does not believe in the legitimacy of the war in Iraq practice psychiatry by counseling some of the most severely traumatized in the Iraqi war."
Let's see some Army medical heads roll for this at Walter Reed, shall we? Lead, Barry, or resign!
Via Instapundit.
So, naturally, Maj. Hasan had to rush out and murder and cripple 43 people. What other choice was there? Same with the honor killings. The perp is always "driven to it" by his shameless wife or daughters. As Phyllis Chesler says: The Jihadist Is Always the Victim.
TALK ABOUT JIHADI SHAME: A woman police officer stopped the Fort Hood perp by pumping four bullets into him. Heh. Too bad she didn't aim to kill.
The old media is saying Army Maj. Malik Nidal Hasan killed twelve and wounded thirty-one at Fort Hood, northwest of Austin, today because he was being deployed to Iraq the war and "was upset about it." Sure. I'll bet.
The FBI, always quick to put its foot in its mouth, already is saying it was not terrorism. As if they could possibly know. Sounds like jihad to me, pure and simple. Otherwise the fool would have killed himself, eh? Rather than execute and cripple strangers.
MORE: Instapundit, as usual on any big breaking news, has a good roundup. More Jihad evidence. Naturally, pathetically, it comes from a British newspaper. Well, Fox had it, too. You know, that news service Barry-the-journalism-expert hates so much. Meanwhile, Newsweak (who else?) blames the Pentagon for overstressing troops like the noble doctor. No Jihad on their radar. Surprise, surprise.
Caption says the "reporters" are studying the inscriptions on the shovels for the ceremonial dirt-turning for a memorial tree for fallen American troops. You know, while Barry dithers about whether they need reinforcements or not. This is what the legacy media does these days instead of asking hard questions. Bush quietly met with the survivors of the fallen. Barry turns their deaths into a photo op and a tree-planting. Frankly I think he prefers them fallen. The fallen don't talk back.
Via Mudville Gazette.
A melodious little essay by a father mostly riding with his driving son across the west to Navy flight training at Pensacola, where my nephew also flew:
"Rested then, and once again on our way, a salt tang in the air, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama giving us back some sense of forward movement after a day hurling ourselves repeatedly against Texas."
Ah, yes, that repeated hurling against the broad width of the Lone Star and its several sharp points. One does that daily, just living here, even in the rolling green hills around home.
Our troops should come home now from Afghanistan rather than continue risking their lives for a doofus president who'd rather criticise Republicans and the rare unfriendly news outfit and play golf than send them reinforcements. Or, in fact, make any decision at all about their fate. What a bum. (President Pantywaist, as the Brit's Daily Telegraph calls him). Our war on terrorism clearly is over. Better to face it than continue to squander our soldiers and Marines.
This seems to be it, as far as the American military is concerned, for the UH-1 Huey, the workhorse troop- and casualty-mover of the Vietnam war. Course the feeling of the nose-down takeoff, the wind roaring through the open side doors, and the distinctive sound of the rotor blades from the ground as one passes over will live on in memory, until the last veteran passes on. Few of them ever even knew it was, officially, called the Iroquois.
Don't recall where I got this, but it's in honor of David Nelson, an old OCS classmate in MA, who awoke this morning to thirty-four degrees and heavy snow. As he says: "Good infantry weather!"
Via AlphaInventions.
This evening in 1835, the New Orleans Greys assembled for the first time in the grand coffee room of Banks Arcade in the French Quarter. They were one of the few volunteer units of the Texas Revolution which could claim battle honors at Bexar, the Alamo, San Patricio, Refugio, Coleto, Goliad, and San Jacinto.
One hundred seventy-three years later, the Mexican government still has their silk "God and Liberty" battle flag, captured at the Alamo, which it has steadfastly refused to relinquish despite requests from governors and presidents. The tattered remnants are believed to be hidden in the archives of the Museo Nacional de Historia at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City.
Given the alleged insubordination of their commander over long-delayed reinforcements, it's not surprising to hear that the troops doubt the value of the dangers they face in Afghanistan. Especially while the Mae West president dithers over whether they need to be augmented or brought home.
Via Hot Air.
Latest news from Brook Army Medical Center in San Antonio on First Cav's LTC Tim Karcher:
"I have no legs, and I accept that. I do not accept that my lack of legs will limit me. The adventure is re-learning, so that I am not limited. Some people talk about how brave or heroic this attitude is, but for me it is simply practical. I refuse to let this keep me from living my life to the fullest, and you would too. It's not heroic, it's realistic. I admit, I look forward to moving through this adventure with others who are travelling the same path that I am. Thus far, many have helped me and guided me, and I look forward to inspiring future wounded Soldiers. Leadership doesn't stop at the hospital door."
Some would. So it's nice to hear from one whose leadership doesn't. Good luck, colonel.
Via Op-For.
I can understand why the father of a dead Marine would beg the AP not to use a photo showing his son, Lance Cpl. Joshua M. Bernard, 21, of New Portland, Maine, wounded and dying in Afghanistan.
The father is a retired Marine first sergeant. Many military families do not trust Big Media and, I think, often with good reason. AP looks especially hypocritical because the picture (part of a slide show here which clearly does not depend on it) is not a prize winner.
On the other hand, it was taken at wide angle from a dozen feet away, it is not graphic, and the young man's face is fuzzily indistinct. You can't even tell where the RPG wounded him, though from the red mass on his lower body it appears to be his upper leg, whose big arteries bleeding out would account for his death. But none of that will ameliorate the truth that will linger in military minds: that a father's plea was ignored. And for what? Sensationalism? To energize the anti-war movement? It's not like people don't know that death happens in war.
UPDATE: The AP also was unprofessional, violating their own embed agreement with the Marines. And Some Soldier's Mom shows why my own yes-buts are beside the point. She gets in her licks about journalistic cruelty-without-an-excuse. Even the former WaPo reporter Tom Ricks is embarrassed.
I know the nephew is missing his P-3, but he's a new father now and that will occupy him. He'll get back on the flight deck someday, I'm sure.
I have ignored the wall-to-wall media coverage of the death, the Valentine (and airbrushing) analysis and the funeral. It was easy to do because I rarely watch television or read newspapers anyhow. But when I heard that the ol' fraud would be buried in Arlington, well...
I know, as many people do not seem to, that Arlington National Cemetery is full of military paper-pushers who never spent two seconds in combat. It is not just heroic ground, despite the heroes who are buried there. But, really, now, Ted never served in the military, and he had zero to do with the assassinations of his brothers. (We can hope.) He doesn't deserve to be there just because he was part of one of the most ambitious, political and publicity-hungry families in American history. Bah.
UPDATE: I'm wrong. He served as a private in the Army, from 1951-53, after he was expelled from Harvard. But, according to this report, his daddy made sure he never had to fight in Korea.
It's an old rule. American soliders win a war. American politicians lose it. It's a wonder anyone serves.
I'm a little late to the program here, this program anyhow. But it's worth noting, and, as we see above it's not just a Marines deal, but an Army one as well. I knew we had women fighter and gunship pilots, and women medics and armed women at security checkpoints. But I was floored by Michael Yon's latest report showing an apparent woman rifleman on a Brit patrol in Afghanistan. I figured it was new. El Coqui, a commenter at Black Five, set me straight. The Brit woman was a Royal MP, along to search women suspects. EC pointed me to the Lioness program. Now we know.
"The Taliban are very brave, but they are ignorant brutal men who murder locals who do not support them, and brave doesn’t stop bullets." --Michael Yon
Sounds like the Viet Cong. Hope they don't have the Cong's tenacity. So far they seem not to have. But this "good war," as the Dems used to call it, to distinguish it from their "bad war" in Iraq, has a long way to go. Yon's piece shows why. Amazes me, though, that the Brit troops have women medics and rifles. These women aren't inadvertently in combat. They are in it on purpose. Revolutionary.
South Vietnam is what this map reminds me of. Think of the red places as NVA-controlled Indian Country. Places where our forces didn't/don't go for very long. S. Warzistan on the left bottom is where that Predator's Hellfire missiles killed all those Talibani at the funeral the other day. Eighty-something. I expected to be reading of Lefty outrage about that by now. The fact I didn't sorta figures, though.This is Barry's campaign now. He campaigned for it. His Leftist pals wanted it. Now they've got it. Lotsa luck. They're sure going to need it.
I think they're all going to be very sorry before The One's first term is over. Iraq was/is the Left's hated campaign, but it's the one that made the most sense to me. Nevermind the WMDs and all that baloney. The point in going in there was/is that it's in the middle of the Jihadi swamp that needs to be drained. I also believe that whatever success we've had there had more to do with the recent Iranian uprising than anything Barry said in Cairo or anywhere else. (He's too longwinded, too on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, to inspire anybody.) So let's see what he's going to do with Afghanistan. Wallow in the quagmire, I expect. Although that Predator strike on a funeral, of all things, was a good start. Wish we'd had more UAVs in South Vietnam. Apaches are nice, too.
U.S. Navy Ensign Osmus has been dead for sixty-seven years, but I didn't know about him until I came across his story reading Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of The Battle of Midway. Now I keep imagining him staring at the Japanese sailor coming at him with an axe as he held onto the chain rail on the stern of Arashi, a destroyer in Nippon's First Carrier Striking Force.
Osmus, a TBD Devastator torpedo-bomber pilot from the carrier Yorktown, had crashed in the sea, been plucked out by Arashi's crew and interrogated by Captain Watanabe Yusumasa. Then Watanabe ordered Osmus thrown off the stern. He grabbed hold of the chain rail; hence the sailor with the axe. Odd that his Web memorial at the University of Illinois makes no mention of his murder, though the 2007 book's authors know it well enough and add: "Watanabe did not survive the war. Had he lived, it is likely he would have met the hangman's noose as a war criminal."
UPDATE: To be fair, I suppose I should link to this, which shows how much things have changed.
In dry dock at Manama, Bahrain. Shows repair work on the sixteen by eighteen hole that sub the USS Hartford tore in the New Orleans in the Strait of Hormuz. The Hartford got the worst of it, but it's still impressive the New Orleans' crew kept it afloat as they did.
Via Information Dissemination.
Sure looks that way to me. Just apply the heterosexual harrassment rules to all. Simple. Nice to see some serving Navy folks coming around to the idea of eliminating the old homophobe hysteria.
I got a little incensed when I read that the new, improved Dem-led Homeland Security octopus had singled out veterans as potential terrorists. Then I discovered the report was commissioned while Bush was in office and it only suggests that a small percentage of vets might be so disaffected.
And, of course, I recalled Timothy McVeigh, the wacko who the Army didn't trust to allow to be a Green Beret. LGF, who I admire for his pro-Israel stance, has a sensible take on this report which seems to be roiling the never-very-placid waters of the rightwing blogosphere. He thinks the upset is way overdone. Includes a link to a PDF of the report itself and points to other, hardly leftwing bloggers, who agree. Makes sense. I'm convinced. Except for one thing. The report should have been aimed at extremism, not just "rightwing extremism." The obvious political bias is what caused the trouble.
From Barry's loony chief of Homeland Security, the Napolitano creature whose latest warning report says we must watch out for returning veterans going postal. She must be a graduate of Penn State.
Not to mention her other warning about Americans who dare to prefer state and local power to federal. She must not have read the Constitution. Or met our Texas governor, who is a diehard Aggie and Sarah Palin supporter, although it is true that he likes federal money as much as the next governor. Yep, the Leftist lunatics have certainly taken over the federal asylum. Watch yourself out there.
White House dithering apparently ended and the U.S. Navy, taking a page from the French, has freed the American freighter captain-hostage in "a swift firefight." One which simultaneously eliminated the CO2 contribution of three of the pirates. The peace weenies probably will carp, but it sends a good and timely message.
The 9/11 generation of military veterans are taking up their GI Bills and going to college, and the nutball liberal war-protesting professors at places like Penn State are getting ready to cut them no slack. Disgusting.
Via Doug Ross @ Journal.
Well, at least one Euro was unimpressed with Barry's first around-the-world whirl, to say the least:
"So The One retired triumphant, having secured a massive contribution of 5,000 extra troops - all of them non-combatant, of course - which must really have put the wind up the Taliban, at the prospect of 5,000 more infidel cooks and bottle-washers swarming into the less hazardous regions of Afghanistan."
Not to mention his brilliant, mid-tour non-response to the North Korean missile launch:
"President Pantywaist is hopping mad and he has a strategy to cut Kim down to size: he is going to slice $1.4bn off America's missile defence programme, presumably on the calculation that Kim would feel it unsporting to hit a sitting duck, so that will spoil his fun."
Well, we already knew Barry was President Thin-skin and all that goes with that little defect. But it's nice to read some news about him for a change. Only odd that we have to go across the pond for it.
MORE: Bowing, or licking Saudi Muslim King Abdullah's boots? I say bowing, but you never know. As one commenter at the link said, we can be pleased it was not a curtsy.
Five minutes is a long time for even me to watch one of those support-the-troops videos. But this one, tipped to me by my chapter of the Army Association, is exceptionally fine.
But the Army did not, and does not, make commercials as good as this Marine one. As the H.E.B. checker-military brat joked one time when she saw my ARMY cap: "Ain't Ready For Marines Yet?" Not on the recruiting score.
More on the B-29s, from Phil Crowther's 6th Bomb Group memorial site. This is from the log of navigator Don Kearney:
"Briefed at 1430 [2:30PM]. Took off at 1732 [5:32PM]. It got dark when we were out just a little ways. The APN-4 Loran inverter was out. Trouble, always trouble. However, the radar did work, although it wasn’t operating on beacon.
"As we passed Iwo, hit some rough weather just north of it. We flew close to the Jap islands going on up to the Empire so that we could check course with radar. We passed within visual distance of Hachijo Jima.
"Heard Birddog 1, a destroyer, talk to 4V705, a superdumbo, about lights.
"We made landfall on the Empire at Omaesaki at 2355 [11:55PM], turned up past the east side of Fuji again. It was easily visible outside the window. Same way we started in the night before last. Way out front Charlie [Lt. Charles Hall, Bombardier] saw a bright red light going down. At first he thought it was a ball of fire but later decided it must have been a B-29.
"As we rolled out of the turn we hit our first opposition, still 15 to 20 miles west of Tokyo...Within a minute we were in it thick. About 15 searchlights picked us up and they began throwing stuff at us. A plane out to our left had 20 lights on him and was catching hell. Still in the lights, we plowed on. We never had less than about 15 searchlights on us at any one time from then on. We flew though the remainder of the target area in a bright cone of lights..."
Read the rest. Go to the main page at the link, click on Air Crews in the left sidebar, then scroll down to crew #3909, Reamatroid, click on the number, then scroll down and start at the beginning of the log.
These are some of the kids who flew the B-29s over the Pacific that napalmed, firebombed and finally nuked Japan into submission. Just in case you may have doubted that they could ever have been so young. Note the babyfaced one in sunglasses. My then twenty-two-year-old father flew B-29s in training in Kansas and Oklahoma but he didn't go on to the Pacific.
I'm actually of two minds on the issue of whether Barry's client Big Media ought to be photographing the flag-draped coffins of fallen troops. On the one hand I do not like censorship, such as Barry's congressional minions are preparing to practice in forging a new law that has the effect of quashing right radio.
On the other hand, the CNN questioner at Barry's first presser put Big Media's real interest out there when he asked if the policy of not allowing photographs of the coffins could be overturned by The One: "Ed Henry with CNN, who asked the President whether he thought the arrival of American coffins at Dover should be accessible to the media to 'show America the real cost of the war....'"
If you want right radio to be allowed, then how can you argue for hiding the coffins? Well, one is free speech, the other is honoring the dead by not turning them into a political spectacle. Plus the coffin policy has been around since 1991. It was not created by Bushitler to thwart the NYTimes and Code Pink.
We didn't hear much about the Iraq elections. A few purple-finger photos, but that's all. Why? Too quiet. Besides, making a big deal about it would only make W. look good and Big Media would never do that. But the Marine, MG John Kelley, who until recently ran Al Anbar province notes that, for its people, this was the first free election of their lives.
MORE: On the other hand, there's an outside chance it could all unravel again.
Strategic retreat, indeed. B. Hussein Obama hinted at such a retreat in his interview with Al-Arabiya, looking back thirty years (the Carter administration) to a purported U.S.-Arab Golden Age. Not that the bloated Pentagon couldn't lose its spare tire, but the times certainly are not propitious for dieting. With all that battered equipment from Iraq that needs replacing. Especially not with a trillion in civilian pork already moving through the Congressional intestine. ACORN could get a few billion. The military must cut fifty-five billion.
At one level, I can understand this Illinois school district's decision to remove Veteran's Day as a school holiday. School holidays usual include a district's need to let teachers and administrators conference during the year, and there can only be so many days off. But the excuse given, that the students don't understand the meaning of Veteran's Day says more about district politics than the students.
It's probably also a clue as to why Illinois (along with Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Minnesota, North and South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas and Missouri) provides only twenty-two percent of the military's recruit-age men (aged eighteen to twenty-four), according to this 2007 2008 study. Not as bad as the Northeast, which comprises just thirteen percent of the total, but only a bit more than half the forty-three percent from the South, which leads the nation.
No, in my support of the IDF, I haven't forgotten the innocents of Gaza. Namely the children who suffered and died during the late unpleasantness. But it's not enough to say they were the victims of the fighting, which Hamas started and continued even after the IDF took them under fire. Hamas, and the PLO before it, have long sacrificed the children of Gaza and the West Bank in the name of a higher hate. They call it jihad. But it's really much older. It's Moloch, the child destroyer, come again.
MORE: Meanwhile, the unilateral IDF truce in Gaza isn't open-ended. If fired upon, they fire back.
Black Five has a good video on the men and women of the IDF which, inronically, uses an anti-war song to show how much we have in common with them: liberal democracy, professional military, and many of the same enemies.
MORE: While you're at it, send them something via PayPal. In other words, support the IDF.
Those strange, floppy "shower cap" helmet covers that IDF infantry wear were introduced in 2006 as a way to cut the contours of an ordinary helmet when seen by a sniper or other enemy soldier in urban as well as rural terrain. It's said they were also a reaction to the Israeli use of new U.S. Kevlar helmets, which were too Nazi-like in appearance for the Israelis. Curiously enough the mitznefet, or "clown hat," as the cover is called in Hebrew, even has an ancient Jewish religious significance.
You can believe Al Reuters, which never stops shilling for the jihadis, when it says the school was a hiding place for refugees frightened from their homes. Or you can take the IDF's word, which is that it was another Hamas ammo dump with an active mortar tube and rocket launcher. I've made my choice.
Independent correspondent Michael Yon on Bush's major achievement with little to no Dem help:
"I'm with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons on this tour and they've been here eight months. And the place we're at, South Baghdad, used to be one of the worst places in Iraq. And now there's nothing going on."
Glad to see our troops did it before Barry and Hairplugs Joe could foul it up. The Afghan campaign will be enough for them.
Turns out the chairman of the Democrat Party in New Hampshire may be another phony Vietnam War wannabee. Hey, there are more than thirteen million of them, according to the 2000 census. But why are so many of them Dumbocrats? Oh, right, now I remember. They protested or shirked at the time. But this guy, Ray Buckley, doesn't have that excuse. He was only twelve years old in 1972. Guess he's just another guy who would rather lie than try.
Via Black Five.
No surprise here. If you were on active duty would you want to be commanded by a guy (Barry) who pointedly never served, and was seconded by (Biden) a Vietnam War draft-dodger? I'm reminded of scifi writer Robert Heinlein's conception: only veterans should be allowed to vote and only mothers should be eligible for office. Works for me.
Via BlackFive.
Sarah, in her capacity as governor of Alaska, sends off the "Arctic Wolves," of the Alaska National Guard, including her 19-year-old son, to duty with the Stryker Brigade in Iraq. She'll speak in Vienna, Ohio, tomorrow. More positive stuff on her here. The negative is easy to find as the "save Barry" news frenzy continues.
It wasn't as good as Palin's, alas. Thank goodness she's on the same ticket, which is more than enough for some previous Mac doubters. Because, after all, she wouldn't be there without Mac's vision and wisdom.
But I enjoyed watching and hearing him. The establishment media covers him so rarely--and never his wealthy wife, a genuinely interesting and admirable person. The POW stuff, which the big-whoop media meisters are bound to complain about, as they always do (it must make them nervous since few of them have served) was powerful and he has the right to use it. It was a good exemplar of the fundamental difference between him and his opponent, and of his brand of patriotism. It also demonstrates, as he suggested, why he is not at all the war-monger the Dems like to paint him. At the same time it shows why our enemies will have to be wary of his resolve, making him much less likely to have to widen the war we're already in.
UPDATE: It seems that Mac's speech outdrew Baby Barry's on teevee viewers. Good for him. And reading the speech, at the link above, I've changed my mind. It was better than Palin's. He knows more. How could it not have been? A young independent more or less agrees.
Chet Richards, one of the guardians of the theories and memory of the late, great Air Force fighter-pilot and military strategist John Boyd questions this contention of Charlie Martin's in American Thinker re Mac's choice of Sarah Palin for veep. Martin uses the term too loosely, suggests CR who says it's too early to tell. CR's claim that the pick was predictable, however, is probably unique. No one else I know of expected Mac to pick a woman. I think the old Navy fighter pilot, indeed, has generally been inside Baby Barry's OODA Loop for some time now with his sharp, quickly-produced teevee ads. Whether he can stay there remains to be seen.
Newt Gingrich on Sarah: "Palin will make mistakes. The news media and the Obama researchers will find things to attack. But if she stays relaxed and continues to be authentically who she has been for 44 years, the country is going to love her..." Except, maybe, the Left, which is terrified of her. And now, in her own words.
One job she'll have to give up when she's vice president: commander of the Alaska National Guard. Which, with the permanently-active, round-the-clock 49th Missile Defense Battalion, is a heckuva lot more important than you might imagine--especially since Russian has resumed bomber patrols.
UPDATE: Good background here on pdf, on missile defense operations, thanks to BlackFive.
Thirty-six humanitarian-assistance flights by C-17, C-130 and other U.S. military cargo aircraft have delivered more than a million pounds of material to Tbilisi, according to U.S. European Command, whose four-star commander Bantz Craddock is in Tbilisi.
More is on the way via a U.S. Coast Guard cutter from Crete and two Navy warships, one due to arrive this weekend and the rest next week. I suppose this, alone, will prevent the Russians from cannonading Tbilisi, although that remains to be seen. It hasn't impeded the Russian sowing of cluster bomblets across some farm fields, however. The bomblets were designed for massed infantry, not for children and farmers, so why did we also use them in Afghanistan? We plainly shouldn't have.
Well, not quite, but almost. Couple of good notices lately, one at the Small Wars Journal and one from Stratfor, of the increasing drug wars going on in Mexico, corrupting their government and spilling over our southern border. If the Mexican government becomes thoroughly, instead of merely traditionally, corrupt, then what do we do? It seems we may have to put troops on the border not just to halt illegal immigration but to keep the Mexican drug wars from invading us as well. I still say, as I have all along, that the only solution is the only one that won't be tried: full legalization as was done with alcohol with similar restrictions, but prices kept artificially low. Then concentrate on treatment, education and enforcement of DUI laws.
It's good to see this report that at least some Georgian soldiers, including a few in desert camo who apparently are from the brigade we returned from Iraq, are still defending their country. They seem to be doing this in the defense of the capital city, according to Georgian Ambassador to the U.S. Vasil Sikharulidze.
This is an idea advocated by John Nagl at Small Wars Journal which makes a lot of sense to this old Army advisor in Vietnam. The role has never been more important, as American counterinsurgency advisors have helped turn around the Iraq campaign and could do the same in Afghanistan. In any case, they will be the last Americans assigned, assisting and training the indigenous armies we leave behind to defend their own countries.
But, as in Vietnam, where the effort was later termed "the other war," as if it wasn't very important, it seems today's Army is being even more ad hoc about it. I got pulled out of a cav regiment for a job advising a couple of companies of Regional Forces and Popular Forces militia known as the Rough-Puffs. We did some training for them, but, with little experience and limited language skills, we hardly ever actually advised the SVN lieutenants and sergeants who ran the patrols and night ambushes. They were usually older and had more combat experience than we did.
I was one of the lucky ones who attended the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg where many of our instructors were Special Forces though we were not. The current advisory crop apparently has less training and one of the same disadvantages, i.e. being outside normal channels, making the assignment no plum for careerists. Advisory work in Vietnam was not even considered command time for line promotion. An Advisory Corps, with permanent units with esprit, etc., could change that.
It also might improve on what me and my five-man team of two officers and three NCOs primarily did. We mainly called in artillery, airstrikes and medevac as needed. Artillery was useful, if the regular unit guns we called were good. Air strikes were, then, usually flown by F4 Phantoms and were often inaccurate. American medevacs, however, were prized, as the SVN troops were afraid of their own medical corps. Our dustoffs would land in the midst of a fight at night. The SVNs would come, if at all, only in the day. Their soldiers also knew their doctors would quickly amputate a wounded limb, which American docs would try to save.
The Internet, of course, is a superlative resource for all deployed soldiers which we would have loved to have had forty years ago, so the current crop of advisors is luckier, in that way, for things such as this nice collection of advisor advice available with one click.
One of the things I like about the Georgian army--in addition to their deployment of a brigade to help us in Iraq--is that they don't goose step when they march, like the Russian army and, of course, the Nazis before them. They've also traded in their AK-47 peasant rifles for precision American M-4s, which they march with at-the-ready. In this stirring video they are seen to be a mixture of the modern and the ancient, and I hope they're doing well tonight on the battlefield.
One more very good reason not to vote for Baby Barry. He'd just throw it all away:
"The Iraqis aren't yet confident enough to stand entirely on their own; al Qaeda's savagery still imposes too much fear, while Iran is training terrorists next door. In counterinsurgency, the people must know they are protected. Gen. Petraeus has proven that intimidation can be defeated by placing American soldiers among the population."
Worth the read, from fav author Bing West.
OCS classmate Bill Cunningham has finally provided the explanation for this phrase which has puzzled and annoyed me for years. Load and lock, okay. But lock and load? Huh?
I had previously found some good history on it, but it didn't explain how the term applied to modern assault rifles. Bill harkens back to our days on the firing range at Fort Benning, reminding that we were told to lock our magazines into our rifles, "with that careful, upward tap for safety," and only then load a round into the chamber. Lock and load. Simple. Thanks, Bill.
There seemed to be surprise mixed in with the anger that Baby Barry ignored the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan--other than the ones specifically vetted for him, black ones for the most part--and skipped the wounded in Germany altogether, during his world tour to create ad spots for his fall campaign. But there shouldn't be any surprise. His own party is doing the best it can to hold down the voting of soldiers overseas. They apparently understand that not many of them would vote Democrat.
There's a lot of teeth gnashing in the conservative blogosphere over BB's tap dancing around the question of whether he should have backed the surge, given its success in Iraq. I watched the cBS video here and, though I don't care much for his politics, I have to say his answer is no more than what any politician, who didn't wish to step down from his earlier judgement, would do. He didn't put down the troops, as some are suggesting. He acknowleged their success, he just questioned the surge strategy itself.
On the contrary, the shift in military strategy, from large unit fighting to establishing lasting community security was almost more important than the additional manpower. As Mac says it's definitely the way to win in Afghanistan, as well. It's just harder there because the people have fewer resources to fall back on, and the terrain is more difficult, with communities more isolated. And with advisers like Gen. McPeak, Barry might just go back to trying to win cheaply, with bombing.
UPDATE: This, however (scroll to the bottom of the post) is a lie, plain and simple. Why it's called a gaffe is beyond me. Politicians tell gaffes. Ordinary people tell lies. But to me, Baby Barry told a lie, to make himself look good. Instead, he looks very, very bad. See if you don't agree.
The MSM, falling all over itself, as usual, to play pattycake with Baby Barry, is quoting one version of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's alleged translation of his alleged praise for BB's withdraw-from-Iraq-in-sixteen-months pitch.
But, wouldn't you know it, there are at least two other alleged translated versions, each with a different emphasis and different caveats. The original one has no caveats. I thought the CIA was the gang that couldn't shoot straight? I know it's heresy to say so (possibly even, gasp, racist) but I still don't believe BB is going to win the presidency. So save your breath Maliki, assuming you, uh, actually said anything at all.
But I got to admit I like it that the Europeans and other foreigners are falling all over themselves to swoon at BB's feet--and I'll bet that, secretly, Mac does, too. Because if there's one thing that will absolutely undercut an American politician who wants to be president, man, that is it.
It's the way to win the Afghanistan campaign, McCain says, logically enough...
"...if I’m elected President, I will turn around the war in Afghanistan, just as we have turned around the war in Iraq, with a comprehensive strategy for victory."
...versus Baby Barry's unserious preference to abandon Iraq in favor of hunting down (the quite probably already dead) Osama bin Forgotten.
Via Belmont Club.
A real baby killer goes free, while two soldiers of the right come home dead, two years after they were captured patrolling the Israel-Lebanon border. But revenge will come, too, and it will be sweet.
Via Simply Jews.
I don't watch television much. Television, as someone said the other day, is for losers. So I didn't watch the president's news conference. So I didn't get the sound of all the word fumbling that he normally commits--although he's nowhere near as vacuous as Baby Barry. But in the transcript, which the White House makes available in these glorious Internet days when one is no longer hostage to whatever the newspapers are willing to print of it, or whatever the teevee and radio folks are willing to air of it, Bush reads pretty good--inspiring, even, unless you hate him as some do.
For one thing, he delivers the most succinct summary of the how of the war on terrorism that I've read in a long time, and there's another good one on just how the oil companies are trying to take advantage of $140 a barrel oil by seeking more supply. Then there's his take, repeated several times to similar questions, about how the American people are smart enough to adjust their own driving and thermostats without the nanny state's help. Lord, yes. How could they not be? All in all, he sounds pretty confident to me, not at all the shell-shocked lightweight the Seablogger encountered on the tube. Maybe there's a lesson here. Read the transcript, people. You've finally got it available whenever you want it. So read it.
I figured from the tip-off title, Generation Kill, that Hollyweird's latest anti-American, anti-war flick (a seven-hour HBO mini-series, no less) was just another slander on the warriors--especially the officers. But I really had no idea how low the media bums could shrink, having a black "marine" call the Iraq campaign "the white man's" imperialism. The real wonder is that the American military can find any good recruits these days who still think this country is worth fighting for, when its so-called entertainment and news industries keep stabbing them in the back.
UPDATE: This pro-troops documentary is still much better.
The daily's print edition has a compelling story (which, disgustingly, you have to dig for on their Web site!) about Iraq campaign widow Taryn Davis, who lives down the road in Buda. Her Web site for her American Widows Project is a poignant look at what these women (and a few men) are going through. What, for instance, do you do now with the Silver Star? This form of grief, it appears to me, is similar to growing old. Forgetting to bathe more than once a week, for instance.
According to war correspondent Michael Yon, it's to grow up to be an American soldier. Photo of U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Fred Hampton, of Lexington, Ky., kneeling to talk with an Iraqi boy in Sadr City, June 20. Credit: U.S. Air Force Tech Sgt. Cohen Young, Joint Combat Camera Center Iraq.
It's interesting how this former POW, recipient of the Medal of Honor and, indeed, America's most decorated living veteran, has figured in recent presidential elections. He helped torpedo John "Seared In My Memory" Kerry in '04, and that's the only item the weasels at CNN cared about in their recent slur of him. But there is another, far more interesting side:
"Years later, Air Force surgeons examined Mr. Day and complimented the [broken arm] treatment he'd gotten from his [North Vietnamese] captors. Mr. Day corrected them. It was 'Dr.' McCain who deserved the credit. Mr. Day went on to fly again."
Read the rest. Mac and Day, a postwar champion of Vietnam veterans, were cellmates at the Hanoi Hilton, and you can be sure that we'll be hearing a lot more from Day as Mac's presidential campaign progresses. Here's the inside story of how he helped get Kerry. Better watch out, Baby Barry.
Cool new advertising campaign from group of Afghanistan and Iraq campaign veterans to counter the anti-war bilge of MoveOn.org. But something tells me there'll be a vets for peace campaign to counter this one before long. May the best ad campaigns win! Though I'd prefer this one.
Via Instapundit
Of course the Dems are going to run ads attacking Mac. The Repubs sure are going to run them attacking Baby Barry. But do the Dems have to lie so blatantly? They're still retailing that distortion of Mac's hundred years comment regarding Iraq. Beyond that, however, this anti-military ad--courtesy of TFG--with the Uma Thurmann look-alike saying McCain can't have her precious baby boy, is quite a hoot. Just wait until Alex grows up a little and sees the G.I. Joe action figures at the supermarket, then figures out that half the guys at his pre-school are playing with plastic soldiers or watching Power Ranger videos. Scream your head off, mom, and forbid all you want. That will just make him more inclined to enlist when he's eighteen. As he should, if he's got any gumption.
UPDATE: NYTimes "fact checks" the ad, at least debunking the lie, but then inserting its own dubious ad calling Iraq "an overwhelmingly unpopular war." No surprise that the video is a product of MoveOn.org, the same folks who libeled Gen. Petraeus in a full-page NYT ad. But MoveOn's partner in it, according to the NYT, is a shocker: the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees. Good grief.
MORE: Don Surber suggests little Alex's side of the conversation, via Doug Ross @ Journal:
"Hi John McCain."
"This is Alex."
"I realize you cannot pick your family."
"But sheesh."
"What a dingbat I have for a mother."
"She's a loon."
"Single mom."
"Eats seaweed."
"Calls the dog her 'animal companion.'"
"Doesn't bathe because soap is made from oil and she wants to reduce her carbon footprint."
"You can see why she's a single mom."
"Fortunately, Dad was a regular guy."
"An Alex P. Keaton type."
"Maybe that's how I got my name."
"Look, about this Iraq thing."
"Can I sign up now?"
"I know I'm little and all and way underage."
"But you gotta save me. She's a loon."
No, the imperial court won't like it. But, it seems, as Ace says, there were just too many pieces of the corpus missing. Yet it amazes me, and it should you, too, just how much time our guys take in identifying a group of Tangos (and their surrounding environment) before opening up on them with a Hellfire missile followed by thirty millimeter from high in the night sky.
Baby Barry and Mac apparently can't agree on the formats for more than a few "debates," as contrived as the "debates" have been in the past and likely will continue to be. Baby Barry's got the money and, so far, the polls and so he has no reason to give Mac anything. Can't blame him for that. As for Mac, well, some of the Seablogger's pessimism is starting to rub off on me. Mac the moderate better get off it and start explaining why he champions the Iraq campaign and why the rest of us better suck it up, too. There are good arguments, but he needs to make them and not try to duck the whole thing. Starting here, where even the Dem thinktankers agree, would be a good idea.
"Visiting in Inez, Kentucky, Senator [and presumptive Republican nominee for president] John McCain [lower right] was asked...why he missed the Woodstock 'musical and pharmacalogical' event in 1969. The Senator, in his sometimes humorous and understated way, said, 'I was tied up at the time.'"
Videos of the world's most expensive warplane show how its Marine version becomes a short-takeoff, vertical landing (like a helicopter) single-engine fighter, Wednesday at Lockheed's plant up in Fort Worth.
Via Instapundit
"The U.S. military has more combat aircraft and pilots than infantry squads," Bing West in 2005's No True Glory.
Usually I reserve Memorial Day for remembrance of the seven classmates and cadre of OC504-68 who perished in Viet Nam. (Eleven others have since died of various causes at home, including AIDS.) But this year I also want to nod to the one hundred twenty-six MACV advisors who died in pursuit of counterinsurgency (the strategy being pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan), at least according to the Virtual Wall, which may not be complete as to MACV. And, especially, MAJ Roger Lee Graham, of my own Advisory Team 15.
UPDATE: I got an email, apparently from Major Graham's sister, wanting any details I had about him. I have none other than what's at the link. I never met him. He apparently was on Team 15 before I arrived in Viet Nam.
Mr. Boy will go with his Mom and grandmother this morning to put a little stick flag on his Navy grandfather's grave at the national cemetery near Dallas, in observance of Memorial Day. I think of his Air Force grandfather, my dad, who's buried in Arlington many miles away. Someday we'll take him there. Arlington probably put out their flags yesterday for all. There's this touching Trace Adkins song about that place.
Glad to see a version of the Vietnam-era bill pass. Sorry to see it was the one predicted to lower retention rates by sixteen percent. But that's the Dems for you. They'll interfere with the war if they can find a way. Meanwhile Dumbocrat veterans (yep, there are some, hard as it might be to fathom) are whacking McCain for not voting for it. Even Barry, the I-never-served-and-never-will candidate, had the nerve to question Mac's committment to his fellow soldiers. Mac smacked Barry back good. The benefits were actually more generous in Mac's bill, which did not pass, but increased with length of service, negating the retention problem.
Barry's crowd has some retrenching to do. They've long been throwing around the sixty-percent-oppose-the-Iraq-campaign poll figure as a justification for their cut-and-run views. But some recent polling shows a sharp rise to fifty-three percent saying the U.S. will succeed in reaching its goals in Iraq. Even CBS admits this could "alter the dynamics of races up and down the ballot." I've never been a fan of polling, which is hampered as never before by changes in the way Americans use their phones. The polls were predicting Kerry would beat Bush right up until election day 2004. But if you live by the polls, Dems, you gotta die by them, too.
Warning to military service members from the Federal Transit Administration in Washington, D.C.:
"Uniformed members [on Metro trains] have been approached by individuals expressing themselves as anti-government, shouting anti-war sentiments, and using racial slurs against minorities. In one instance, a member was followed onto the platform by an individual who continued to berate her as she exited the metro station...military members should be vigilant and aware of their surroundings at all times while in mass transit."
Disgusting. Be sure to thank the next service member you see, wherever you see them.
UPDATE: This may be a hoax, which is sad, but altogether better than if it were really happening. Read the comments at the link for more.
To hear the media tell it, Israel's checkpoints don't do much more than harrass the long-suffering Palestinians. The Palis are always trying to get the "peace process" to eliminate the security checkpoints. They usually fail because every so often, another suicide bomber tries to get through, like the 20-year-old Arab man wearing five pipe bombs who was shot and killed by the IDF at a Samaria checkpoint last night.
Harken to the tortured cry of the lying looney-bird, explaining why McCain should not be president:
[Iowa Democrat Tom] Harkin said that "it's one thing to have been drafted and served, but another thing when you come from generations of military people and that's just how you're steeped, how you've learned, how you've grown up."
Apparently this is why we need the Weightless Man in the White House whose inexperience includes no military service or tradition thereof. Insane. Harkin has trouble with heroes because he was only a phony one himself, several times over, in fact. Quite the liar, this particular Dumbocrat.
Afterall, he's getting away with murder in Iraq, and the Bush administration and Congress ain't doing nothin', while Barry talks about a sit-down to understand Mahmoud's pain.
UPDATE: So, when Bush does the only thing he ever does about this matter, i.e. talk, he manages to enrage Barry, Hilarity, Nancy, etc. For why? Because they won't do anything, either, and don't like to be reminded. Such unanimity.
I was waiting for a good moment to buy Michael Yon's book about Iraq, and Michael Totten's revealing review is the one. The fact that the book is already in its second printing and currently No. 167 on Amazon's bestseller list also is encouraging.
MORE: Cobb has an interesting take on it, from quotes from Yon's changed-his-mind-on-Iraq publisher, to Cobb's angry responses to some commenters. As he says: lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.
Good news from the recruiters: "All military services met or exceeded their monthly recruiting goals in April, with the Marine Corps signing 142 percent of the number it was looking for, the Pentagon said."
The (in)famous banner, subject of so many lies (which some of the commenters here repeat) and MSM sneers since 2004, was created for and addressed to the crew of the USS Abraham Lincoln only, according to one who was there. Of course if "CVN 72" had been added to it in the first place, there'd have been no confusion possible.
The really amazing thing about King's latest, unthinking putdown of the troops--"...if you can read, you can walk into a job later on. If you don't, then you've got, the Army, Iraq..."--isn't that he is repeating another famous fool, John Kerry. It's that he's so dumb that he imagines you can a) get in the Army without being able to read, and b) that you could do the job the Army wants without being able to read. I've enjoyed some of King's books. But none of them taught me anything important. It really does surprise me, however, that he could write any of them while being such a moron.
UPDATE: Air Force veteran takes him on, too. And Doug Ross @ Journal, too: "The Dead Zone known as Stephen King's brain."
President Bush is basically a nice guy, which he proved more than once when he was governor of Texas. Which, of course, is way too nice for the rude, undereducated, overmedicated slugs of the MSM. So it's always a pleasure to see it when he cuts loose on a supercilious one with both barrels.
Via The Fat Guy
Time magazine once again proves why I was wise to stop subscribing to and reading it years ago.
Via Instapundit
I remember the pathetic MSM speculation about how the Army transportation reservist's reported capture four years ago might have been made to cover up his desertion to get away from the war which the media still works so hard to undermine. The homecoming for Maupin, with its miles of yellow ribbon, was impressive, as was the memorial service at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati. It was, obviously, not just for him alone, but for all the ones who gave all.
Bill Roggio, embed blogger/journalist in Iraq, for instance: Fair play? From the NYTimes? You've got to be kidding.
Via Instapundit
Morris, twenty-three, of Cedar Park, northwest of Austin, was a driver for a team of military advisors embedded with the Iraqi army.
Whatever Nancy Pelosi intended to stop the general from saying, it doesn't seem to have worked. He poked Iran in the eye several times. Will we do anything more? Remains to be seen, I suppose. It all certainly sounds as complicated as Viet Nam ever was, though, obviously, with more potential immediate impact on our daily lives, and not nearly as out-of-control. Hope and change, it seems, are already in progress--without, of course, Barry and his dictator-loving advisors and their back-to-the-Saddam-era intentions.
One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist, as the famous relativist's line goes. In this case the one man speaking of Saman Kareem Ahmad is U.S. Army General David Petraeus, and the other "man," so to speak, are the incompetent bureaucrats of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Michael Totten explains.
The Iraqi endgame is in sight. Insightful, non-biased reporting from freelance correspondent Michael Yon:
"If there is an increase in casualties here as we go into the summer of 2008, it is because our people and the Iraqi forces are closing in. We have seen just how deadly al Qaeda can be. This enemy is desperate. They know they are losing."
Via Fresh Bilge
Army SPC Monica Lin Brown, a medic from Lake Jackson (south of Houston) who joined with her brother in 2006, becomes only the second woman since WW2 to earn the Silver Star for combat valor.
You've probably heard about Jimmy McCain, the son of presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain who's an enlisted grunt in the Marines and recently returned from Iraq. Now meet the one who's got another year before he graduates from the Naval Academy. Jack McCain provides a good (if probably varnished) look at his father. I hope he's right that dad's temper is pretty much a myth. It wouldn't surprise me.
It leans a bit toward the airborne, but straight legs get near-equal time. Nice video for you vets or wannabees. Especially you wannabees of enlistment age. Now IS the time!
Obama may not know much about ground troops, but he's got part of the wild blue yonder covered. Retired Gen. Merrill McPeak, a former Air Force chief of staff, is a key supporter of the candidate he praises for "real gravitas." McPeak is still a bit of a loose aerial cannon, a role he established in the first Gulf War when he stepped on some toes by declaring the campaign the first time air power had defeated a field army. But his presence in Barry's camp shows the junior Illinois senator isn't a total neophyte when it comes to military affairs--despite the fears of other general officers, some Air Force ones included.
UPDATE: Protein Wisdom has a profile of McPeak which suggests Barry is securely in the surrender-in-Iraq camp, and not just lying to the lefties, like he's lying to the rust belt on NAFTA.
Not that it matters, at least here in the San Francisco of Texas, which is pretty well set as Obama Country for the Texas Dem primary, judging by the bumper stickers and yard signs. But Barry's claim at last night's Dem/MSM dog-and-pony-show (laughingly called "a debate") that our troops in Afghanistan are so desperate that they must capture their weapons from the Taliban is wacko.
From the CNN transcript: "You know, I've heard from an Army captain who was the head of a rifle platoon -- supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24 because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn't have enough ammunition, they didn't have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons, because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief."
First of all, captains lead companies, not platoons. And for various reasons that would be obvious to anyone with minimal knowledge of our NATO vs the Taliban's Russian weaponry--which apparently does not include Barry--nothing they have would be useful to us and vice versa. Different rifles. Different rifle ammo. Different shells. &c. So now we see that the Dems' prospective Pacifist-in-Chief is a bigger boob than anyone thought. Or else his wife (she of the finally-proud-to-be-an-American remark) isn't the only one affected by self-righteousness and the blunders it breeds.
UPDATE: Heh. And Barry's claim flew right over Hilarity's head, as Wretchard points out. These Dems labor in amazing ignorance sometimes.
MORE: ABC News' Jake Tapper interviews the captain Obama quoted, though does not name him or feel the need to question or corroborate his details, and shows (though Tapper doesn't say so) that Barry (to be charitable about it) garbled the officer's message. For one thing, the captain didn't say fifteen of his men went to Iraq, or that they lacked ammunition in Afghanistan, or raise the crucial Obama detail that they needed captured weapons--only that they had used some of them from time to time. Obama also didn't mention that this information was five years old, occurring in 2003. So, while Tapper concludes that we bloggers have gone off half-cocked, I still think it's a shoddy political performance, and close to an outright lie.
Used to be a buzz was when an aircraft flew over a few hundred feet above the ground. So it seems a little silly to call a Russian Tupolev bomber's overflight of the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier in the Pacific Ocean a "buzz" when the lumbering, 55-year-old propeller-driven bomber stayed 2,000 feet above the steel beach. Or is it just a wire service's attempt to embellish a story of the so-called new Cold War?
It was bad enough that they had to weld an expedient steel cage around it to keep RPGs, one of the most ubiquitous weapons in the Middle East, from destroying the Stryker utterly. Now the Army, in a burst of true dumb, has created a version called the MGS which has a 105mm gun and enlarged turret on top of it, blocking crew exits from two forward hatches and eliminating the vehicle's air-conditioning. Not only is it a sauna on wheels, but it's a death trap. It's also now too heavy and too bulky to easily fit into a C-130, scrapping its original reason for being: air transportability. You might suppose the all-volunteer force would have eased this kind of bureaucratic stupidity. You would be wrong.
Finishing "A Thousand Splendid Suns" got me interested again in Afghanistan, which I admit had fallen off my radar as of late. Just in time to find out that things look bleak. Nothing like the days when the Taliban was in charge, but apparently sliding back in their direction. NATO isn't owning up to its promises, Canada is getting antsy, the Bush administration is promising a few thousand more Marines. This is supposed to be the Dems favored campaign, well Hilarity's. Obama, last we heard, wants to retreat everywhere and invade Pakistan. Nowadays, he says nothing. What would McCain do? Shift troops there as they are withdrawn from Iraq? One brigade at a time? At least we know he won't give up.
Via Soobdujour.
Remains to be seen whether it'll be enough, but Army Iraq veteran LTC Greg Gadson, who played football at West Point, has been an inspiration to the New York Giants. We can expect he'll be on their sidelines at the Super Bowl later today and remember to look for him.
Thanks to rare regular reader Anna for the link.
UPDATE: I guess Gadson was good enough, because they won it all in the final minute, 17-14.
If you can't stop the war, stop the recruiting. What pitiable fools these Californians be:
"...the Berkeley City Council...voted 8-1 Tuesday night to tell the U.S. Marines that its Shattuck Avenue recruiting station 'is not welcome in the city, and if recruiters choose to stay, they do so as uninvited and unwelcome intruders.'"
Can't be different in one-eyed Berkeley. So much for diversity. But they never meant diversity of ideas.
Via Instapundit
I was looking for an excuse to avoid the new movie about the latest violent Cormac McCarthy book, No Country for Old Men, set in a mythical West Texas, and Marc Leepson of the VVA Veteran magazine has provided it in the latest issue--which isn't at the link yet, but will be soon. "No Movie for the Faint of Heart," is his review of this Coen Brothers flicker. Why, I wonder, is Hollywood so invested in extreme violence, as the only alternative to the bad-America message-movie crep they normally churn out? What ever happened to musical comedies and light-hearted romances? Gone with the wind, I guess. I don't wonder why they typically use Vietnam veterans as mindlessly-violent characters, as the Coens do here one of them in this movie more or less is. It must be part of Scientology's secret credo. At any rate, it's too characteristic of their work to be chewed over. Leepson pronounces this one a tsunami of blood and guts, boring in parts, not very thrilling, and ultimately pointless. Yep, that's McCarthy and Hollywood, peas in a pod.
In New York City. In a new Adam Sandler movie that treats Israelis sympathetically. What a concept. With such immortal lines as this one: "We've been fighting for 2,000 years--it can't be much longer." I'm not going to break down and cross the sticky floors of a local movie house, but I will rent the DVD.
Via Roger L. Simon
Instead of wasting energy or emotion on the latest NYTimes slander of America's warriors, take a minute to see this new less-is-more Marines recruiting ad. Then one more minute to check out the wordier but still impressive Army one. Outstanding.
I confess I didn't pay much attention to the NYTimes' latest smear on combat veterans--implying without context (statistical or otherwise) that the sometimes dubious violent crimes of 121 returned Afghanistan and Iraq veterans are connected to their combat experiences. The Democrat house organ helped invent the slur on Vietnam combat veterans as "ticking time bombs," making us the forerunners of the actual Muslim suicide bomber. But Ralph Peters doesn't overlook such things, even if they aren't news. In "The New Lepers," he describes the latest smear as "an artful example of hate-speech disguised as a public service."
Via Instapundit
MORE: Beware the brutal veteran journalist, with actual incidents. Humor from Iowahawk. You might need to worry, because a lot of them are going to be laid off in the near future.
Amazing computer animation of the structural-failure accident that has forced the grounding of many F-15 Strike Eagles. You can argue about how many air-superiority fighters are needed nowadays, but apparently not about the longeron problem afflicting some of these 25-year-old aircraft.
MORE: The Air Force blames manufacturer McDonnell Douglas's work in the 1970s.
The surge is obviously working. You can tell because Iraq is no longer front page news very often, and most of the pols have stopped yammering about pulling out. But good Americans are still dying there, including this 37-year-old, Big Red One Iraqi army advisor and milblogger from Colorado Springs. Oddly enough, he left behind his own final post and this sayonara:
"I'm dead, but if you're reading this, you're not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact."
Via Instapundit
MORE: A friend who served with Olmsted at Fort Carson, CO, remembers him in this touching tribute. And word is finally trickling out about how AJO died: a sniper got him while he was trying to talk some insurgents into surrendering.
I've posted before about this effort to help our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan call home. But today, receiving a relative's Xmas gift for Mr. B in an Amazon box, I found a soft-plastic mailer for the program, postage-paid, inside. Pretty cool. Makes it very painless. Indeed, Mr. B. and I rooted out an old cell phone from the garage and dropped it into the mailer. We'll take it to a mailbox later today to mail it. It's another good reason to shop Amazon when you can.
The daily devotes much of its front page today to a PTSD story about soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. It is pitched as a benign, help-them-out article, but with the underlying aren't-you-glad-you-didn't-join subtext that furthers the civil-military divide explored in this piece by military historian Robert Kaplan who notes:
"I cannot remember how many times a soldier or marine told me that we don’t want to be pitied as victims, but respected as fighters. That respect is not abundant..."
Indeed, it is almost nonexistent among the political and academic elites with whom most journalists identify. So far, Kaplan says, it hasn't damaged the American military, but he wonders how long it can go on without doing so. He concludes: "...one thing is certain: We're fated to find out."
A very cool idea for the troops. A gesture that's easy to remember. Easy to do. And hard to forget.
UPDATE: A friend likes this one but also suggests others: "The sign language gesture is good to know about and it's quite nice. I use several other better known gestures at airports and on the street, a quick salute, or flash the 'A-OK' sign with the thumb and index finger, or quietly clap my hands (as in applause). Those all work great to get the message across. There are others when you stop and think about it such as the gals could blow them a kiss. That could keep a guy awake on night guard duty in Iraq remembering that."
MORE: Active-duty commenters at Op-For weigh in. They say they remember every one.
Twenty-eight retired generals and admirals signed a letter to Congress today asking for repeal of the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" law in order to allow gays to serve openly in the military:
"The former officers offer data showing that 65,000 gays and lesbians now serve in the U.S. armed forces, and that there are more than one million gay veterans. 'They have served our nation honorably,' the letter states."
The law in question was something of a milestone when it was enacted fourteen years ago. It was a kind of half-a-loaf. But it's past time to make it a whole loaf. The existing sexual harrassment rules will work for gays, too.
Want to help a troop in Iraq or Afghanistan call home? Here's where to send your old phone to aid the call--by a superior service originated by a Massachusettes 13-year-old and her 12-year-old brother.
For my money, Norman Mailer's famous World War II war novel "The Naked and the Dead" just plain stunk. I'm sorry I ever read it. I never read it a second time. I only remember the fashionable cynicism, and the probability that the author never saw combat or had any idea what it was like. Comes this essay reminding me, not only that Mailer's book was perhaps the first popular literary assault on American military heroism, but that we have the pugnacious little squirt to thank for much more, including the rap generation and the media's persistent glorification of violence.
It began today, in 1884, in a seven-room house on sixteen acres at 1600 West Sixth Street in Austin. Five years later its backers were soliciting money from Union veterans to run it for the remaining 34 of the 113 veterans that had since occupied the house and an adjoining tent. The state took it over in 1891 and expanded it to twenty-six acres to include a hospital and cottages. Along the way it also housed impoverished veterans of the Spanish-American War and World War I. The last Confederate there died in 1954, age 108. The home was effectively closed in 1963.
Some may say this would have been the result if we'd had more troops in Iraq in the first place. But the cause of these declining numbers is more likely to have been the switch in tactics, from conventional to counterinsurgency--which is, in itself, the wave of the immediate future of American war. Some contrarians are even calling it the most successful military campaign in history. Hope that lasts.
Via Instapundit
The booms that won't be booming:
"Yesterday a joint US-Iraqi force with help from local anti-al-Qaeda awakening fighters in the Adhamiyah district in northeastern Baghdad found and disarmed more than 20 vehicles rigged as VBIEDs in a parking lot."
Talk about progress in the Iraq campaign. Wow.
"For accomplished soldiers who have just had their independence ripped away, anything that can shorten that process is welcome. For Chuck, it was a computer. 'When you’re using something that takes your mind off the pain…you get the benefit of your body being able to recover without being heavily drugged,' he said."
Give 'til it helps, won't you?
Next year I'll get something new, but for the second year in a row, I think this will do for Veterans Day--the seal/decal of my old OCS class and the various places we served in Vietnam. Also this, which takes me back to the American Revolution, on my mother's side, to Thomas Farrar, a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina "line" of the Continental Army, and Claudius Pegues, Jr., a captain in the South Carolina militia. I suspect our military service goes back much farther, but I don't know anything about it. And, while we're at it, let's not forget the wannabees, who are sure to be strutting around today in their phony uniforms. No sweat. Let them play, if it makes them feel any better.
Hollywood's latest crop of anti-American war flicks are tanking at the box office, which AFP blames on war weariness, but the comments beneath the piece at Breitbart.com tell a different story which most veterans will appreciate this Veterans Day weekend: Hollyweird finally, deservedly, is a victim of itself.
Via LGF
According to the MSM all they do is crash. In fact, the new MV-22 Osprey Tiltrotor is part of the USMC's surge in Iraq.
No time like the present to help Soldiers' Angels help a wounded soldier, sailor, airman or Marine with a free voice-activated laptop to allow him/her to communicate with friends and family, prepare for a job, etc. You don't have to give a lot. Every little bit helps.
Readers over at Simply Jews are debating what Isaelis should do about the continued rocket bombardment from Gaza. The usual and, I think, easy, high-mindedness is in evidence--Jews don't stoop to the level of the enemy--as well as realism that nothing will change until the cooperating Gazan civilians, young and old, pay a price along with the masked gunmen of Hamas. I side with the realists, just as did the so-called Greatest Generation--at Hamburg, Dresden, Yokohama, Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Bret Stephens relates. High-mindedness is good, but the cost of keeping your conscience clear will be the certain deaths and cripplings of young soldiers who would no more lob rockets at a daycare center than strap on a bomb belt and detonate themselves in a crowded supermarket. Ethics in warfare have to be situational, as Stephens also seems to be saying, and the deciding factor must be the probable results. In Gaza, that would be an end to the rockets and, quite possibly, something approaching the German and Japanese surrender.
This is the GPS-guided artillery round that's putting the cannon cockers out of business. In Iraq and Afghanistan they're already being handed rifles and turned into infantry. Because with Excalibur, you don't need a barrage of shells to be sure you have eliminated a target. One is all that's necessary.
On my second visit to Austin's VA Health Clinic I was impressed by everything: the friendly people, the clean facilities, the new equipment. Got a flu shot from a tech with a no-pain technique. The doc I was assigned to wanted to run me through the normal blood work, but I pointed out I was scheduled for the full deal, including EKG and X-Rays, Dec. 11 in Temple for the Agent Orange Registry. Did he want to duplicate it? Fine with me. He didn't. I especially liked the ambience that everyone's on the same page. I saw why my late father-in-law, a Navy retiree, preferred VA hospitals to private ones. PTSD questions in the med exam surprised me. I think they're more for new veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq than Vietnam after so many years. Nevertheless. Nightmares? Check. Fear of loud noises? Nope. Avoid situations reminding of combat? Nope. Feelings of detachment from others? That one surprised me. I thought it over and said I would have to answer yes. Wondering now what the Temple exam will uncover in December.
This tale of an urban observation post in Iraq that suddenly turned deadly shows that Al Q can be pretty observant too.
Via American Power
Military heroics are seldom reported in the media these days, MSM or otherwise. So it's rare to find a story of battle heroism. Mainly because of people like this woman, a professional journalist who has to struggle to find excuses for her appalled friends when her son joins the Army to serve in Iraq. But here's a heroic story, and a book, that deserve knowing, told by an East Texan who fought behind the lines in Afghanistan. The book is selling, and so a movie may be made, which worries him. He knows Hollywood knows (and cares) nothing about this war.
Bobby Caina Calvan is famous now, at least in the blogosphere, for being a jerk in a war zone. I read his post, saved here after his California newspaper took it down. I sympathized with him, to an extent, though I reserved most of it for the soldier he hassled. And I have to agree that Bobby's too arrogant for his own, or anyone else's good. Replace this smartass boy with a man, ASAP.
Scott Beauchamp, the Hemingway-wannabee soldier who was caught slandering his comrades in the pages of The New Republic, is making up for it, according to independent reporter Michael Yon:
"...to his credit, the young soldier decided to stay, and he is serving tonight in a dangerous part of Baghdad. He might well be seriously injured or killed here, and he knows it. He could have quit, but he did not. He faced his peers. I can only imagine the cold shoulders, and worse, he must have gotten. He could have left the unit, but (his battalion commander) LTC Glaze told me that Beauchamp wanted to stay and make it right. Whatever price he has to pay, he is paying it."
Good for him. The whole report, along with good photographs, though none of SB, is worth the read.
Via Patterico
UPDATE: Peggy Noonan: TNR's "report" was a generational thing. Raised on the movies, 'sted of real life.
"The situation in Iraq has drastically changed, but the inertia of bad news leaves many convinced that the mission has failed beyond recovery, that all Iraqis are engaged in sectarian violence, or are waiting for us to leave so they can crush their neighbors." --Independent journalist Michael Yon's latest.
His father and mother (who live in San Antonio), and his fiance (re-deploying to Iraq as a medevac pilot)--are all Army. He left behind a web site, and a lot of friends.
Just like the Dems, make a non-veteran chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee. Like he'd know a lot about it. You bet. Not that the Dems have a lot of veterans, you understand. Sure has a big smile for a guy who pushes airport employees around.
Via Mudville Gazette
The credibility of the agenda-driven news media gets thinner every day, but never more so than when they are caught hiding their own dirty laundry. Such as these and the many similar words of native Texan and retired Army Lieut. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez (the caps are from the transcript of his speech, not me shouting):
"WHAT IS CLEAR TO ME IS THAT YOU ARE PERPETUATING THE CORROSIVE PARTISAN POLITICS THAT IS DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY AND KILLING OUR SERVICEMEMBERS WHO ARE AT WAR."
Tough stuff, and wholly unreported by the WaPo and the AP--not to mention the BBC--whose work the rest depend on. I suppose they rationalized leaving it out because it was said in a professional, non-public setting. But that's not much of an excuse. Note Sanchez's Old Testament Bible quote at the end, which you can bet galled the Leftists.
Via Powerline, where you might start before reading the transcript . And Ace of Spades, which shows the speech was cherry-picked almost entirely for its Bush-bashing. No surprise. The Democrat political agenda rules, even as circulation, advertising and credibility crater. At least they're making the Columbia Journalism Review happy.
"Whatever one’s views on the war are, it seems to me morally reprehensible that anyone would slander an American soldier, whether comparing them to terrorists or their General to a betrayer. We have a very rare precious resource in today’s military that really does represent the moral upper crust of American society, and as long as it is engaged, we need to support it."
I don't think you'd find many American veterans who disagree with that and you should read the rest of this analysis by military historian Victor Davis Hanson, who recently returned from Iraq.
UPDATE: Part II of VDH's report, with a third to come. Here's Part III.
Former Marine, winner of the Navy Cross and author Marco Martinez is the sort of troop you're not likely to meet in the MSM. He isn't bitter, homeless or haunted. He felt honored to fight in Iraq.
"The army recruiting effort is unprecedented for wartime. Never in American history has a war this long, been sustained with only volunteers."
Despite all the pressures from the pols, the MSM and Hollywood, the volunteers keep coming. Thus the Army once again met its recruiting goal of 80,000 newbies for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. The Marines continued to exceed their goals.
"The country is whole. It has embraced the ballot box. It has created a fair and popular constitution. It has avoided all-out civil war. It has not been taken over by Iran. It has put an end to Kurdish and marsh Arab genocide, and anti-Shia apartheid. It has rejected mass revenge against the Sunnis. As shown in the great national votes of 2005 and the noisy celebrations of the Iraq football team's success in July, Iraq survived the Saddam Hussein era with a sense of national unity..."
A hopeful, longish look at Iraq, well beyond the political squabbling in Washington, and from a center-left magazine, no less. For that reason, alone, it is well worth the read.
Actually, it was my second encounter. The first was in 1971, when I used the G.I. Bill to go to graduate school. But that was just by mail. This was the local health clinic, where this morning I began the process of getting on the Agent Orange Registry. I though it was to be a health checkup. Instead, it was a signup, getting a picture i.d. done and being assigned to a doctor. The first checkup with him will be at the end of October.
The clinic was packed. They handle military retirees these days as well as veterans with little or no private health insurance. The Military Order of the Purple Heart was serving coffee. The security guard asked me if I was carrying a weapon or a knife. I said no. There was a long table of service caps and unit pins for sale, mostly Vietnam units, in case you shed your military identity years ago and now you want it back. The clinic is in the highest-crime part of town--where the land is cheapest, I suppose--so it's surrounded by a high fence topped with concertina razor-wire. That's a reminder of how military service is degraded in this country: Once the pols, the news media and Hollywood finish beating you up, you get shabby health care. It's a wonder anyone serves. Better would be the system that Navy veteran Robert Heinlein wrote about in "Starship Troopers," where only veterans were allowed to vote or hold public office. That would really shake up this society.
More and more I'm of the opinion that no American man or woman should be advised to join the military under any circumstances, certainly not to actually go into combat arms and fight for their country.
If the career politicians aren't accusing you and your comrades of war crimes, then the news media prefers to publicize the sad sacks among you as the norm.
If that isn't enough, elite universities like Columbia (which you likely couldn't get into) are only too happy to give a podium to one of the leaders of the murderous regimes killing your comrades.
Finally, the icing on the cake arrives in your local movie theater for the edification of your family and neighbors: Hollywood has produced yet another epic showing that you and your comrades are not only war criminals and sad sacks but obviously mentally and morally deficient for not knowing in advance that war is always bad and never justified--especially when Americans are fighting it.
Since there's no way to come out of it with any pride (and the VA benefits suck), why bother?
Seems the email story--poo-pooed by some--about the Marines being left on the tarmac at Oakland International Airport is true. Seems like those California airport officials could have--at the least--arranged free delivery of soda pop and snacks. Although I'm sure it would be better to land in Dallas or some other Red State, where real consideration for the military is the norm. Maybe they should plan to do that in the future.
UPDATE: Like this volunteer effort to greet the troops in Dallas, for instance
"With only two days remaining in September, U.S. forces are on pace for the lowest number of monthly fatalities in more than a year."
Good news, especially considering the pols and the MSM have made American casualties the primary metric of judging military campaigns. But check back in late Oct-Nov to see if this really is a trend.
Why we couldn't simply replicate the Afghanistan/Taliban approach in democratizing Iraq:
"It is not enough to persuade a Muslim population to reject al Qaeda's ideology and practice. Someone must also be willing and able to protect that population against the terrorists they had been harboring, something that special forces and long-range missiles alone can't do."
Read it all.
"The Bush Presidency is running out of time to act if it wants to stop Iran from gaining a bomb. With GIs fighting and dying in Iraq, Mr. Bush also owes it to them not to allow enemy sanctuaries or weapons pipelines from Iran. If the President believes half of what he and his Administration have said about Iran's behavior, he has an obligation to do whatever it takes to stop it."
Less talk and more action would be a good idea, both for the present and for the future.
"Hollywood acting as a collective voice stakes out an anti-victory position on the current war in Iraq, continuing its deplorable 40-year streak of working against the United States' strategic objectives at a time of war. Congratulations to every heroic studio exec and heroin-addled reality star for being ahead of -- and helping to move -- the polls."
Read it all.
Navy F/A-18 from the USS Enterprise refuels off an Air Force tanker, somewhere over the Persian Gulf. Probably not from this tanker crew, but who knows?
Via Op-For
Help restore a vandalized snack shack for IDF soldiers. Helps if you have a PayPal account, but it can be established with a credit card number. Good photos of the young soldier patrons are at the link.
This is an old favorite of mine. It's a four-plus years old photo, from the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom, and these gals may no longer be flying KC-135 Stratotankers for refueling fighter-bombers over there. But you can bet that they're flying aerial gas stations somewhere. It's a nice illustration of both the all-volunteer military and the 9/11 generation. They are not what you think.
Those hundreds of rockets that Hamas has been raining down on Israeli towns (and an Army barracks) are about to get a military response and a few civilian ones (like shutting off the air conditioning), since Israel provides more than half of the Gaza electricity and fuel. The dictator's club at the UN (of course) decries Israel's recent declaration of Gaza as an "enemy entity," but the White House backs it.
The plot thickens. Seeming success in Iraq breeds efforts to undermine it. Leftist MoveOn, for instance, didn't invent the slur "betrayus" for Gen. Petraeus that they used in their execrable ad in the NYTImes. They got it from some of his old enemies within the military, who had long used it as a nickname for him, say the usual anonymous sources. Chief among those antagonists is his boss at CENTCOM, Admiral William Fallon. As VHD might say, Gen. Sherman likewise was despised by more than a few generals in the Union army. Only his boss, Gen. Grant, held them at bay while Sherman led his devastating march through the South. P.'s boss does not back him, but President Bush does. Will it be enough?
The full text of Bush's speech, via Instapundit. I read it but I didn't watch it. I still like his resolve, indeed, I'm grateful for it. But I long ago despaired of W as a communicator. Let's hope and pray our next president is much better at it, whichever side wins. We need it, I think.
MORE: VDH on the speech: "So the country looks to Iraq and our maverick General Sherman outside Atlanta, where the battlefield, as it always does, will sort out the politics."
Anonymous ones, that is. I don't know what to make of it when little media and big media square off with their anonymous sources, and new media picks up little media's charges without scrutiny. Big media, of course, uses anonymous sources all the time. This time the small, conservative American Spectator magazine is claiming two unidentified sources to support its assertion that the NYTimes gave the leftist MoveOn group special treatment in its purchase of a full-page display ad calling Gen. Patraeus a "Betray Us" traitor. The newspaper denies it. The first anonymous AS source, characterized as "a MoveOn organizer," says the group got a $100,000 discount for the ad. The second unidentified source, called "a former NYTimes ad staffer," says a coalition of conservative Pro-Life groups were turned away for any ad, let alone a discounted one. The magazine also adds, without any attribution, that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were similarly turned away before the 2004 presidential election. Instapundit and other conservative blogs have picked up the Spectator's charges without qualification, though Instapundit did insert the word "apparently" in its item about it. The conservative NYPost picks up the story, but also relies on anonymous sources. What is the truth? Your guess is as good as mine. To me, the use of anonymous sources makes it hard to sort it out, whichever media claims to have it.
MORE: However much MoveOn paid, Fred says the ad was reprehensible. Of course it was.
UPDATE: Rudy raised a big enough stink about the ad that he's getting the same rate to run his own defending Petraeus.
"It is often said that had the weeks in the hedgerows after D-Day (June to late July 1944) or the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944 to January 1945) been televised each hour on CNN or Fox—with real-time email and cell phone communications with beleaguered soldiers in the field—we would never have won either battle."
--Military historian and prolific military author Victor Davis Hanson on the new face of Western war.
MORE: Underscoring Hanson, there's this bad news. Whatever the good Gen. Petraeus had to say, and what I saw sounded like realism to me (insurgencies, as he wrote in the Army's new manual, take a decade or more to defeat), the Iraqis apparently aren't impressed with the surge. Not that the campaign has ever been entirely for them, mind you. Or that I would trust a BBC poll in the first place, but it's worth considering.
Just in time for the Jewish new year, a little reminder for Iran and Hezbollah that Syria might not be a safe transit point for North Korean or other weapons into Lebanon and Israel. More analysis from The Belmont Club, and Snoopy the Goon in Israel. At the very least, it demonstrates that Syria's new Russian air defenses aren't up to snuff.
They are the best memorial of that terrible time six years ago today: They continue to join the military, particularly the Army and Marines, despite the rigors of repeated deployments and the probability of combat. Thus the two services met or exceeded their recruitment goals again last month.
In the Marines, it's Military Occupational Speciality 0311. In the Army, it's MOS 11 Bravo. Doesn't matter what you call it, it's still the infantry. And, though the ancient Greeks used men of all ages in the phalanx, theirs was a different kind of war. Nowadays, it is, as W. Thomas Smith Jr. says, young man's work.
Via OpFor.
Teflon Don has vivid dreams, including one of his platoon at the mall, and a dead friend making and selling coffee, just like he wanted to.
Recruitment ads, combat video, training exercises. It's all there, on the BlackFive YouTube network.
There's not much I find to like about Hollyweird, that typically anti-American collection of nutcases who produce among the tritest and worst movies in the world--including, lately, one ridiculous, lying political rant after another--usually starring people you wouldn't want to waste time with, unless--like them--you're a Scientologist. But there are exceptions. One is the venerable actor Paul Newman, 82, whose Light Italian (con limone!) salad dressing I've been enjoying for a while now. He's a WW2 Navy vet who donates his Newman's Own food products' after-tax profits to various charities. One of them is Fisher House which puts up families of wounded soldiers and Marines while they are being treated. Try his products. They're good, and they genuinely support the troops. No, I'm not getting paid to say so.
The Army's report on the June death of Sgt. Lawrence Sprader, Jr., in a Fort Hood training accident faults the trainers. So reports AP which apparently had to force the release via FOIA.
"Across the Fence: The Secret War in Vietnam," was vanity-pressed by Real War Stories.com three years ago but, partly for that reason, and also because heroism books about Vietnam aren't generally approved by the New York-based publishing industry, it went unreviewed. Comes now fulsome praise for it in a lengthy look at such books in the Aug. 24 issue of Atlantic.com. I haven't read it yet, but I have ordered one. It's available here for $15.95 plus shipping. Also, sort of, at Amazon which has it priced, used, at $127. Must be a typo. Sight unseen I will recommend it to my rare readers, especially combat veterans of any war. The author, J. Stryker Meyer (whose nickname was/is Tilt), is an old acquaintence I worked with in the late 1970s at a daily in New Jersey. He's now married, has five kids (including one serving in Iraq) and is still an ink-stained wretch, for the North County Times, near San Diego, where, last fall, he outed a local pol claiming to have been in Special Forces. JSM, a MACV-SOG veteran, was always a good writer, and the review says he still is, calling his combat writing "pure grain alcohol." His is one of a bunch of recent books about Vietnam popular with Iraq and Afghan veterans. Try it. We can compare notes when we finish.
Thanks to the Seablogger for the pointer to the Atlantic.com article.
With the big media, and their sycophantic imitators, it's all about the narrative, the "quagmire" or "the surge isn't working." For a few, it's lately become rather astoundingly flipped to "the surge is working." There's still scant middle ground in their reporting from Iraq. Not so with independent journalists like Michael Totten. With them there's always room for bewilderment. Especially when it comes to Mookie Sadr, the Shia puppet of Iran, leader of Iraq's branch of Hezbollah, whom we still refuse to arrest, deport, kill, etc. Instead, surge or no surge, the vicious little neo-Saddam killer goes on and on.
UPDATE: Uncle Jimbo at BlackFive says Mookie's recent declaration of a hudna is a stall. Of course it is. He says letting Mookie live was one of the biggest mistakes of the Iraq campaign. Right again.
I can't find a link for it, but the September issue of AUSA News (The Association of the United States Army) has an article about the service's May and June shortfalls in recruiting, something they will certainly will make up for July, August and September from new high school and college graduates. The news therein that I wanted to mention was the cheery note that more than 900,000 Americans have volunteered to serve in the Army since 9/11, and more than 700,000 soldiers have re-enlisted. Retention, indeed, remains high despite the pressure of multiple deployments: 101 percent of the goal for the active Army, 119 percent for the Army Reserve, and 107 percent for the Army National Guard.
The MSM has not covered itself with glory in its reporting of the training-accident death of Fort Hood's SGT Lawrence Sprader, Jr. on June 8. A report this morning in the daily read like a catch-up piece of some kind, so I went searching the Web for more. I discovered that, on Monday, the Associated Press in Fort Worth reported that judicial action was pending against one or more soldiers involved in the training exercise, a solo compass nav course across difficult, brush-covered terrain in mid-90 degree heat. Today, the Killeen Daily Herald, which has the further incentive of proximity to the fort to endeavor to get the details right, says that only administrative action is being taken, and the judicial action is only "possible." Reading between the lines, it looks like some of Sprader's superiors were involved in a coverup of the reasons for his hyperthermia, dehydration death. But it's hard to be sure, since the Army, so far, is not releasing the details of its investigation. The MSM, meanwhile, seems only to be being its usual sloppy self.
UPDATE: It took some pushing, apparently, but the Army has released the investigation report.
If this is true, and knowing the recent machinations of the Associated Press, it's hard to tell...
"Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol."
...then it is a comment on the poor planning of the bullet industry, considering that the current military campaigns are puny compared to previous wars.
UPDATE Scott, at The Fat Guy, thinks its the cops' fault. They're wasting ammo.
MORE: Ha! The AP story is bogus. More MSM anti-war narrative bull. Now why am I not surprised? But it also seems Scott came closer to the truth, i.e. the militarization of our domestic police forces is unnecessarily running up the ammo bill.
The Soviets, er, the Rooskies, are at it again. Putin, it seems, wants the Cold War back in play.
Via Fresh Bilge
Imagine Afghanistan as brown and tan and rubble-strewn? Some of it is, certainly, but not the Switzerland-like 10,000-foot "foothills" of the Hindu Kush in these beautiful photos put up by Blackfive of a 91st Cav air assault. Clean out the jihadis, build some hotels and tourism could really take off.
This and Iraq Prime Minister Al-Maliki's latest suckup to the mad mullahs are prime reasons to air strike them, but Robert Haddick at Westhawk doubts we'll do it because, in the final analysis, it wouldn't be permanently effective. Instead he foresees non-state terrorist groups going after Iran to stop their nuke program for their own reasons. Sunnis, I suppose. Al-Q biting the hands feeding it.
Most newspaper libraries I've been in stock a current copy of the liberal Nation and, in their minds, to "balance" things out, a current copy of The New Republic, which is mainly liberal but pretends to objectivity. I have never seen current or even outdated copies of National Review, The Weekly Standard, or any other blatantly conservative mag. Don't want impressionable young reporter minds polluted with contrary ideas, you know. Now the Confederate Yankee blog has figured out one of TNR's anonymous confirming sources on the Beauchamp fiasco--very surprisingly, a normally very public public relations man for BAE Systems, the maker of the Bradley IFV, named Doug Coffey--and discovered that he was not asked to verify what Beauchamp reported, only some general queries. Now that he knows what the actual issue was, he is calling BS on Beauchamp's report. Pretty slick TNR. You almost got away with it.
The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" admits he erred (or, as Power Line says, the actual word is lied) about one of his three controversial reports. The others he's apparently sticking to, and TNR claims (not very convincingly) to have anonymous sources corroborating them. Ah, those everpresent anonymous sources the MSM loves so much. So handy. His chain of command, meanwhile, says they can find no proof of the other two incidents, either. No word yet on Beauchamp's fate. Ah, the wages of ambition.
UPDATE The Army makes it official. They can find no evidence, etc., for the truth of any of it. TNR is sticking to its anonymous sources. Standoff, I guess you could say, except that Mr. Beauchamp is sans laptop and cellphone and, henceforth, is incommunicado.
Teflon Don has a short, succinct explanation for why there's so much difficulty in keeping the electricity on, four years into the Iraq campaign, even for soldiers who patrol all the time, except for the afternoon hours when they try to sleep in the unalleviated heat.
Jack Kelly, a veteran himself, has got it right. The New Republic's "Baghdad Diarist" has been outed and now his journalistic and military "careers" are on the line, as well they should be:
"Now that they've demonstrated their diarist is a real soldier, the New Republic's editors feel vindicated. But the issue is not whether Pvt. [Scott Thomas] Beauchamp is a soldier. It's whether he's telling the truth or not. And his story stinks to high heaven."
As Kelly says, if he's lying, then he and his liberal editors are exposed as the partisan fools they are. If he's telling the truth, then he and everybody in his chain of command is headed for judicial punishment. Either way, Chuck, you're toast.
Michael Totten brings his unique eye to reporting from the center of the surge:
"The 82nd Airborne Division is famous for being ready to roll within 24 hours of call up, so they were sent first. The surge started with these guys. Its progress here is therefore more measurable than it is anywhere else."
I especially like these lines from an earlier report, the sort thing you would never see in the MSM because it diminishes the favored narrative, not to mention the club:
"You’d think explosions and gunfire define Iraq if you look at this country from far away on the news. They do not. The media is a total distortion machine. Certain areas are still extremely violent, but the country as a whole is defined by heat, not war, at least in the summer."
Start here, then click on Home Page and start from the top. Then find the link to give him some money, so this stuff keeps coming.
Sound familiar? Try "the damaged Vietnam veteran." Hollywood is so predictably awful these days. The Iraq version will be the theme of the newest Hollywood anti-war movie, "Stop Loss," according to the Drudge Report. Well, really, what can you expect from the land of a thousand cokeheads and Scientologists? Patriotism? Belief in the country? Not hardly. Though, as Drudge points out, their predecessors had the courtesy to wait until World War II and the Vietnam war were over before slandering their veterans. Some courtesy. Cretins.
Much as I enjoy The Weekly Standard, I must say their new cover piece, "The 9/11 Generation," isn't very impressive. Conservatives, who love to bash the news media--which often deserves it-- nevertheless need to hold their own to higher standards, as well. This article, about a generation that's willing to fight, is long on generalities and short on sources. Only four sources, to be exact, and only three of them arguably of the "9/11 Generation." The editor apparently believes those three are sufficient to characterize the whole. Really, now. I'm sure the men and women who join these days, knowing there's a good chance they'll wind up in harm's way, deserve our commendation. I'm also sure they aren't the "children," or the "victims" or the "gullible" or the "hopeless" that liberal pols often term them. There apparently are enough of them to keep the military meeting or exceeding its recruiting quotas. But, as it happens, I know three members of the "9/11 Generation," and they dismiss my suggestion that they join the military. They refuse to fight what they call Bush's war. See how easy it is to refute The Weekly Standard? It shouldn't be.
When your aim in journalism is to shock, you run the risk of going too far, becoming tempted to make things up to fit your narrative theme, like a latter-day Chuck Tatum massaging the details of the "grieving widow" device in Billy Wilder's cult classic "Ace In The Hole." Cynicism and ambition run amuck. So it seems to be with Scott Thomas, the pseudonym of an alleged private whose "Baghdad Diarist," for the credulous liberals of The New Republic, is attracting the attention of a growing number of milbloggers--like Matt Sanchez--who are hot on his trail.
"His latest entries are making the rounds and, have raised a lot of doubts," Sanchez writes. "Those who have served in Baghdad are questioning how true these stories are...I don't want to know who this guy is, I just want to fact check his stories."
Shockers like a baby's skull some Neanderthal supposedly digs up and uses for a crown under his Kevlar helmet; the bored Bradley driver who goes out of his way to run over a dog; and the insensitive jerks who mock a disfigured woman in a Camp Falcon mess hall, where Sanchez, too, just happens to dine. So far the Bradley tale is getting the most workout, here in The Weekly Standard, where Bradley veterans explain how they know it's fiction. Tatum (Kirk Douglas in the 1951 film) would do anything for fame. Thomas seems to be following his lead, and the military-hating libs are, naturally enough, sucking it up. As for TNR, well, like the minor league newspaper editor in "Ace In The Hole," they're not looking too close at their good thing.
UPDATE The flak (information officer) at FOB Falcon weighs in, shooting down the baby skull item, and questioning the ones about the disfigured woman and the Bradley.
MORE Then the magazine's editor says it is investigating the accuracy of the articles.
STILL MORE The chickens are coming home to roost as the 1st SGT in the Diarist's unit says he "has other underlying issues" and his writings are "fairy tales." No surprise there. And, finally, Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette sums it all up.
A remark, said a Hillarity mouthpiece, which was "outrageous and dangerous." Dangerous? Sure, just ask Vince Foster. Oh, wait.
"Gen. David Petraeus, commanding general of the Multi-National Force -- Iraq, had recognized a soldier memorialized at Fort Bliss on Wednesday for excellence. Another was remembered as acting with a heartfelt kindness that convinced suspicious and war-weary Iraqi residents to support coalition forces."
There was laughter at the memorial, as well as grief, for CPL Jeremiah D. Costello, SPC Joseph P. Kenny, CPL Keith V. Nepsa, and PFC Raymond N. Spencer. Worth a read to see why.
