If I had a nickle for every time I made that complaint — damn herpes!

But I suppose its differnt in an aircraft..

When I was hanging out with my brother and his buds on base in Germany, they showed me a similar video that had been making the rounds. It was taken from an AC-130 gunship and showed insurgents setting up a weapons cache before being cut to pieces.

The thing about it that bothered me most was how many steps up the chain of command the gunner had to go to get authority to take the shot. It looked like a clearcut situation; the guys on the ground had RPG’s and AK’s. But it took about five minutes for the AC-130 to pass a description of the situation up the chain and then get the go ahead from some commander back in Kuwait. Yes, of course, we don’t want to kill civilians. But we also want to operate effectively. It was shocking.

That’s is great that he joined up, it’s good to have that type of attitude. But that was also why i joined the Marines. I didn’t want to be an occupation member, baby sitting. That’s what cops are for. If anything we need the money to go to the right places. Don’t the Iraqi soldiers earn like 3x the national yearly average? That’s a great start too. Unfortunatly, our MSM is so completly biased agaisnt the bush/united states that we dont hear about the thousands of confirmed kills that Marine snipers have dispatched. Bring back the body counts. We need a media like start ship troopers where we see infantry blowing away the enemy. I have a video on my computer of an iraqi getting mowed down by a m240g - he was attempting to fire and rpg.

I want to see video like that. You know what? I’d pay for it too!

All that I ask when people ask me how they can support me is to write me letters about thier lives and be good citizens by fighting progressivism and socialism. We have it was too good here to have it be destroyed by those evil ideologies.

But a lot of his fellow troops had the same attitude before going to Iraq, and that attitude changed.

Combatting evil is one thing. But let’s face it: acting as an occupying and besieged army in a country with no established connection to 9/11 may not really give you a satisfactory sense that you are combatting evil. There are too many logical, contingent steps along the path of cause and effect between what we are doing in Iraq and how it will prevent terrorism. It doesn’t have the ring of revenge. So it’s hard to fault these veterans for doubting the soundness of their mission.

I believe that in this day and age, we deploy our armies to combat evil. I was having this conversation the other day with someone in class. I was 17 and I wanted to test my self and become a man, so i signed up in the Marines. I don’t know why anyone else would join the MILITARY other than to “close with and engage the enemy in close combat to destroy the ability and spirit of the enemy to fight.” Of course there might be financial perks that someone might confuse with the previous clause as thier primary reason…but war sucks, and it hurts when you don’t get the sweet stuff the generals promise. Yes I think it hurts the moral and probably doesn’t encourage reenlistment, but I still think that the reason they are over there is to kill the enemy. No enemy, no reason to be there.

Your insight on basic military discipline is appreciated; as an ex-Marine I’m sure you know more than I do. But the 1AD has very good reason to fault Bush, and not the brass, for the sudden extension of their tour.

Why wouldn’t it happen with any other president? It might, but the fact is it happened with this one: at the behest of the President and his various secretaries and undersecretaries, we went into Iraq before we had enough troops in place to do the job right. This is due in part to conditions beyond Bush or the brass’ control: Summer was impending & Turkey refused to let us deploy the 4th from the north.

Even so, grave and gathering as Saddam’s danger may have been (and yes, we all thought it was), I think a few more months after more than a decade of stalemate would be a reasonable sacrifice in time to do the invasion / occupation right. But Bush couldn’t wait and went in without all his pieces in place. As a direct result we had a rapid deterioration of the situation after major combat operations had ceased, and it was that deterioration that prolonged the 1AD’s deployment.

I’ll grant you, soldiers are always complaining about something. It’s part of the life. But I think the 1AD is right in these circumstances to direct their anger past the brass at the guys pulling the strings. That’s my take; perhaps you see it differently?

We have such a fucked up culture fromt the past…

If your troops are bitching, there is something fucked up. If my privates all of the sudden got quiet and pleasant with me, i’d probably cut ‘em down at the knees because they were probably really close to killing me. If your troops aren’t willing to murder you in broad daylight, then you aren’t efficiently and effectivly commanding your resources.