The Briefing Room
General Category => Military/Defense News => Topic started by: famousdayandyear on June 12, 2013, 01:49:49 am
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Origin unknown. From an email:
Message from a Recon Marine in Afghanistan :
This young man is articulate and has a flare for colorful language, and descriptive prose... Scorpions, Chiggers & Sand Fleas/great letter, must read!
From the Sand Pit...
It's freezing here. I'm sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains , along the Dar'yoi Pomir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave. Stake out, my friend, and no pizza delivery for thousands of miles.
I also glance at the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard. The antidote tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five vials of it in my pack.
The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy. I track the couriers, locate the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld, shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware. We bash some heads for a while, then I track and record the new movement.
It's all about intelligence. We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats have no idea what they're in for. We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin. But you know me, I'm a romantic. I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows, man. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here, like we know jobs.
Afghanistan offers two ways for a man to support his family: join the opium trade, or join the army. That's it. Those are your options. Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party. But the smell alone of those 'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.
I've been living with these Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. and even a couple of Pushtuns, for over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure: These guys, all of 'em, are Huns... actual, living Huns... They LIVE to fight. It's what they do. It's ALL they do. They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor for each other, nor for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism. Cavemen with AK-47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky.
I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to write letters, right? Do me a favor, Bizarre. Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart. I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals, and hyenas, and wolverines. They are sneaky and ruthless, and when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites, who create nothing, and destroy everything else. Smart. Pfft. Yeah, they're real smart.
They've spent their entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go), and consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil. They're still figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen; eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it. OK, enough. Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole. Covering my tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.
Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives. The story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit, and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here, because you have no idea what we're doing, and really, you don't want to know. We are your military, and we are doing what you sent us here to do.
Saucy Jack
Recon Marine in Afghanistan
Semper Fi
"Freedom is not free... but the U.S. Marine Corps will pay most of your share".
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Thanks for posting this.......
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Interesting read.
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And I still maintain that if one were to analyze the racial components of the military AND the KIA in Afghanistan since Obama became POTUS...you'd find that the vast majority are Caucasians and not Black or Hispanics.
....no such thing as a coincidence here.
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And I still maintain that if one were to analyze the racial components of the military AND the KIA in Afghanistan since Obama became POTUS...you'd find that the vast majority are Caucasians and not Black or Hispanics.
....no such thing as a coincidence here.
Black man's war, white man's fight?
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Black man's war, white man's fight?
yeah....or else it means that the vast majority of "special forces" are white kids.
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And I still maintain that if one were to analyze the racial components of the military AND the KIA in Afghanistan since Obama became POTUS...you'd find that the vast majority are Caucasians and not Black or Hispanics.
....no such thing as a coincidence here.
About 65 percent of the population of the US is Anglo, so if the special forces are representative of the country as a whole, they'd be 65 percent white. You think they are more than that?
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About 65 percent of the population of the US is Anglo, so if the special forces are representative of the country as a whole, they'd be 65 percent white. You think they are more than that?
All I know is that when the Washington Post gets on their high horse and publishes the pictures of the KIA....I only see about 10% minority races.
It's confusing to me because African-Americans are the majority in football and basketball, etc..
Hmmmm.....maybe it's because they're such poor swimmers. :whistle:
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All I know is that when the Washington Post gets on their high horse and publishes the pictures of the KIA....I only see about 10% minority races.
It's confusing to me because African-Americans are the majority in football and basketball, etc..
Hmmmm.....maybe it's because they're such poor swimmers. :whistle:
They may also be over-represented in the military as a whole. I think it does take a certain combination of guile, fortitude, brains and brawn to succeed in special forces. Whether that tends to disqualify one group or another based on subcultural influence, I can't say, or won't say because we cannot speak of such things in our "free" society.
But I note your observation and do not disagree with its accuracy. Just don't expect me to bail you out when the political correctness police lock you up.
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They may also be over-represented in the military as a whole. I think it does take a certain combination of guile, fortitude, brains and brawn to succeed in special forces. Whether that tends to disqualify one group or another based on subcultural influence, I can't say, or won't say because we cannot speak of such things in our "free" society.
But I note your observation and do not disagree with its accuracy. Just don't expect me to bail you out when the political correctness police lock you up.
LOL! I was being flip about the swimming comment.
But it does really bother me that the vast majority of the boys KIA look like Indiana Hoosiers.
And with this regime....that ain't no coincidence.
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LOL! I was being flip about the swimming comment.
But it does really bother me that the vast majority of the boys KIA look like Indiana Hoosiers.
And with this regime....that ain't no coincidence.
Oh, now I see. You think OPapaDoc doesn't want to put the homeys in harm's way?
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Oh, now I see. You think OPapaDoc doesn't want to put the homeys in harm's way?
Well....my two older sons served in the US Army...one served in Iraq for Operation Desert Storm...the other in Korea.
They both told me that the overwhelming vast majority of "typical" soldiers in their regiments were black....and I always subscribed that was because of economics and the difficulty in finding 'meaningful' jobs after formal schooling.
They also told me that there are a tremendous number of blacks serving in the military that have embraced Islam....sort of like you'd find inside the US prison system. They hang and recreate together.
Like somebody recently said....it's not math, it's arithmetic. LOL!
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Well....my two older sons served in the US Army...one served in Iraq for Operation Desert Storm...the other in Korea.
They both told me that the overwhelming vast majority of "typical" soldiers in their regiments were black....and I always subscribed that was because of economics and the difficulty in finding 'meaningful' jobs after formal schooling.
They also told me that there are a tremendous number of blacks serving in the military that have embraced Islam....sort of like you'd find inside the US prison system. They hang and recreate together.
Like somebody recently said....it's not math, it's arithmetic. LOL!
Except with this crowd nothing ever adds up the way it's supposed to.
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I think I remember reading this piece years ago, not long after the US went into Afghanistan?? At any rate, I think it's been a lot of years since Aaron Brown was at CNN.
Probably doubtful that anything in Afghanistan is better now than it was then. Oh, except they know our timeline for withdrawal now. :pondering: