Fred's latest missive

[lemonjello]

http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

December 17, 2006



It’s all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he's half the man his father was?

The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.

The talk among pols now is about finding an “exit strategy.” This means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress. Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five words: “OK. On the plane. Now.” Bring your toothbrush. Everything else stays. We’re outa here.

It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to all. But we won’t use it. We will continue killing our men, calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.

Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This isn’t new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to “save face”—at two hundred dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren’t among the dead, or among the GIs.

I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon’s plan to save face. “His face, our ass,” was the reply. Just so, then, and just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in Kansas anyway.

Soldiers are succinct and do not mince words. This makes them dangerous. We must keep them off-camera to the extent possible. A GI telling the truth could set recruiting back by years.

The truth is that the government doesn’t care about its soldiers, and never has. If you think I am being unduly harsh, read the Washington Post. You will find story after story saying that the Democrats don’t want to do anything drastic about the war. They fear seeming “soft on national security.” In other words, they care more about their electoral prospects in 2008 than they do about the lives of GIs. It’s no secret. For them it is a matter of tuning the spin, of covering tracks, of calculating the vector sum of the ardent-patriot vote which may be cooling, deciding which way the liberal wind blows, and staying poised to seem to have supported whoever wins. Screw the troops. Their fathers probably work in factories anyway.

Soldiers do not realize, until too late, the contempt in which they are held by their betters. Here is the psychological foundation of the hobbyist wars of bus-station presidents. If you are, say, a Lance Corporal in some miserable region of Iraq, I have a question for you: Would your commanding general let you date his daughter? I spent my high-school years on a naval base, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as it was then called. Dahlgren was heavy with officers, scientists, and engineers. Their daughters, my classmates, were not allowed to associate with sailors. Oh yes, we honor our fighting men. We hold them in endless respect. Yes we do.

For that matter, Lance Corporal, ask how many members of Congress have even served, much less been in combat. Ask how many have children in the armed services. Look around you. Do you see many (any) guys from Harvard? Yale? MIT? Cornell? Exactly. The smart, the well-off, the powerful are not about to risk their irreplaceable sit-parts in combat. Nor are they going to mix with mere high-school graduates, with kids from small towns in Tennessee, with blue-collar riffraff who bowl and drink Bud at places with names like Lenny’s Rib Room. One simply doesn’t. One has standards.

You are being suckered, gang, just as we were.

It is a science. The government hires slick PR firms and ad agencies in New York. These study what things make a young stud want to be A Soldier: a desire to prove himself, to get laid in foreign places, a craving for adventure, a desire to feel part of something big and powerful and respected, what have you. They know exactly what they are doing. They craft phrases, “Be a Man Among Men,” or “A Few Good Men,” or, since girls don’t like those two, “The Few, The Proud.” Join up and be Superman.

Then comes the calculated psychological conditioning. There is for example the sense of power and unity that comes of running to cadence with a platoon of other guys, thump, thump, thump, all shouting to the heady rhythm of boots, “If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian cunt, Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef….” That was Parris Island, August of ’66, and doubtless they say something else now, but the principle is the same.

And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country. This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on Pennsylvania Avenue. You will figure this out years later.

Once you are in the war, you can’t get out. We couldn’t either. While your commander in chief eats steak in the White House and talks tough, just like a real president, you kill people you have no reason to kill, about whom you know next to nothing—which one day may weigh on your conscience. It does with a lot of guys, but that comes later.

You are being suckered, and so are the social classes that supply the military. Note that the Pentagon cracks down hard on troops who say the wrong things online, that the White House won’t allow coffins to be photographed, that the networks never give soldiers a chance to talk unedited about what is happening. Oh no. It is crucial to keep morale up among the rubes. You are the rubes. So, once, were we.

[billyjoe]

Fred and Lemon,
We lost aproximately 3,000 give or take in the Sept.11th attacks. According to the president we had to kill the potential terrorists in Iraq so this wouldn't happen again. In the 3 3/4 years we've been killing future and current terrorists, approximately 3,000 more of our finest young men have given their lives along with 22,000 wounded. On the Iraq side estimates of 25,000 civilian deaths along with uncounted wounded don't seem to have cut the number of terrorists at all. The number of incidents of bombings and U.S. troop deaths is going up ,not down. We now are concerned about saving face and not appearing to cut and run and accept defeat. All the while our boys continue to die and for what? Will we see a marked decline in U.S. casualties six months from now or will we still be deciding how to get out without looking defeated ? Several of my son's high school classmates are serving in Iraq now and I fear every day for them. Have we really cut the threat of another attack on our soil or are we creating a new generation of terrorists who might just wait until they are old enough to get over here and seek revenge in a few years?

--------------billyjoe

[Runner]

I always believed the Commander in Chief should not be elected unless he has spent time on the ground as an Infantryman. This would get my respect and this will never happen. You see unless one has walked in your boots they have not a clue. In each of my tours of combat and I’ve been deployed 4 times I would say I did things for the man to my left and right. We often would have to do things that most would turn heads in shame. This asshole talking about the President eating steak and you killing people we have know reason to kill needs to get a life. He needs to drive down any Iraqi city in his nice plush Mercedes and see how fast he reaches for his water pistol. I bet he would be one to try to talk his way out of a jam out there.

Folks our troops are doing a very difficult job and they are placed in very difficult situations. Many do what they do for survival and yes this often means killing someone who intends to kill them.

I saw early in this war that we did not have a defined exit plan and the speed at which the invasion went took most by surprise.

Here is my high school educated plan to exit this mess you ready? I think we should build a wall dividing the country into parts. These jokers have been killing each other for hundreds of years. When this phase beings turn it over to the United Nations and begin redeployment out of theater. Have the Country divided in different states. Each region would have it’s own leader. How’s that for a plan? We will always maintain a substantial size of troops back in Saudi

[lemonjello]

While I respect your opinion, I think you've got the wrong idea about Fred. He'd probably admit he's an a-hole, but he's definitely not some limo liberal just trying to attack W for political reasons. Check out his bio.

I always believed the Commander in Chief should not be elected unless he has spent time on the ground as an Infantryman. This would get my respect and this will never happen. You see unless one has walked in your boots they have not a clue. In each of my tours of combat and I’ve been deployed 4 times I would say I did things for the man to my left and right. We often would have to do things that most would turn heads in shame. This asshole talking about the President eating steak and you killing people we have know reason to kill needs to get a life. He needs to drive down any Iraqi city in his nice plush Mercedes and see how fast he reaches for his water pistol. I bet he would be one to try to talk his way out of a jam out there.

Folks our troops are doing a very difficult job and they are placed in very difficult situations. Many do what they do for survival and yes this often means killing someone who intends to kill them.

I saw early in this war that we did not have a defined exit plan and the speed at which the invasion went took most by surprise.

Here is my high school educated plan to exit this mess you ready? I think we should build a wall dividing the country into parts. These jokers have been killing each other for hundreds of years. When this phase beings turn it over to the United Nations and begin redeployment out of theater. Have the Country divided in different states. Each region would have it’s own leader. How’s that for a plan? We will always maintain a substantial size of troops back in Saudi

[DSteckler]

Fred and Lemon,

In the 3 3/4 years we've been killing future and current terrorists, approximately 3,000 more of our finest young men have given their lives along with 22,000 wounded.

Not just men, Billyjoe. Women, too.

[billyjoe]

Not just men, Billyjoe. Women, too.

Dave,
My mistake. There have been 64 American women that have lost their lives in Iraq. My father and mother were both WW11 veterans so I shouldn't have missed that.

-----------billyjoe

[Tatnic]

[QUOTE=lemonjello;74476]http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Column.htm

I'm no fan of the two idiots in the white house, but many troops join up for purely patriotic reasons and not because they are "duped". Many others join for purely financial reasons...if you're a country boy with absolutely no prospects and bored to death, joining the military is a huge step up in your life. After 911 there was a surge in enlistments...I suspect that surge has now become a dribble because too many are now not willing to accept a$20,000 signing bonus in exchange for their life.

But on the bright side, how bout those obscene bonuses on wall street!!

[lemonjello]

Here's Fred's bio. You will note - he was a country boy (Crumpler, W.Va.) who joined up with the Marines during Vietnam and left with a purple heart.

I'm not saying Fred is the final authority on the Iraq war. It's just interesting to me to read his different take given his experiences in Vietnam as a marine and a reporter on the ground in Vietnam and the Middle East.

http://fredoneverything.net/FOE_Frame_Bio.htm

As He Tells It

I was born in 1945 in Crumpler, West Virginia, a coal camp near Bluefield.
My father was a mathematician then serving in the Pacific aboard the destroyer USS Franks, which he described as a wallowing and bovine antique with absolutely no women aboard, but the best the Navy had at the time.

My paternal grandfather was dean and professor of mathematics and classical languages at Hampden-Sydney College, a small and (then, and perhaps now) quite good liberal arts school in southwest Virginia. My maternal grandfather was a doctor in Crumpler. (When someone got sick on the other side of the mountain, the miners would put my grandfather in a coal car and take him under the mountain. He had a fairly robust conception of a house call.) In general my family for many generations were among the most literate, the most productive, and the dullest people in the South. Presbyterians.

After the war I lived as a navy brat here and there--San Diego, Mississippi,
the Virginia suburbs of Washington, Alabama, what have you, and briefly
in Farmville, Virginia, while my father went on active duty for the Korean War
as an artillery spotter. I was an absorptive and voracious reader and a terrible student, and had by age eleven an eye for elevation and windage with a BB gun that would have awed a missile engineer. I was also was a bit of a mad scientist. For example, I think I was ten when I discovered the formula for thermite in the Britannica at Athens College in Athens, Alabama, stole the ingredients from the college chemistry laboratory, and ignited a mound of perfectly adequate thermite in the prize frying pan of the mother of my friend Perry, whose father was the college president. The resulting six-inch hole in the frying pan was hard to explain.

I went to high school in King George County, Virginia, while living on Dahlgren Naval Weapons Laboratory (my father was always a weapons-development sort of mathematician, although civilian by this time), where I was the kid other kids weren't supposed to play with. My time was spent canoeing, shooting, drinking unwise but memorable amounts of beer with the local country boys, attempting to be a French rake with only indifferent success, and driving in a manner that, if you are a country boy, I don't have to describe, and if you aren't, you wouldn't believe anyway. I remember trying to explain to my father why his station wagon was upside down at three in the morning after flipping it at seventy on a hairpin turn that would have intimidated an Alpine goat.

As usual I was a woeful student--if my friend Butch and I hadn't found the mimeograph stencil for the senior Government exam in the school's Dempster Dumpster, I wouldn't have graduated--but was a National Merit Finalist, and in the 99th percentile on the SATs.

After two years at Hampden-Sydney, where I worked on a split major in chemistry and biology with an eye to oceanography, I decided I was bored. After spending the summer thumbing across the continent and down into Mexico, hopping freight trains up and down the eastern seaboard, and generally confusing myself with Jack Kerouac, I enlisted in the Marines, in the belief that it would be more interesting than stirring unpleasant glops in laboratories and pulling apart innocent frogs. It certainly was. On returning from Vietnam with a lot of stories, as well as a Purple Heart and more shrapnel in my eyes than I really wanted, I graduated from Hampden-Sydney with lousy grades and a bachelor-of-science degree with a major in history and a minor in computers. Really. My GREs were in the 99th percentile.

The years from 1970 to 1973 I spent in largely disreputable pursuits, a variety that has always come naturally to me. I wandered around Europe, Asia, and Mexico, and acquired the usual stock of implausible but true stories about odd back alleys and odder people.

When the 1973 war broke out in the Mid-East, I decided I ought to do something respectable, thought that journalism was, and told the editor of my home-town paper, "Hi! I want to be a war correspondent." This was a sufficiently damn-fool thing to do that he let me go, probably to see what would happen. Writing, it turned out, was the only thing I was good for. My clips from Israel were good enough that when I argued to the editors of Army Times that they needed my services to cover the war in Vietnam, they too let me do it.

I spent the last year of the war between Phnom Penh and Saigon, leaving each with the evacuation. Those were heady days in which I lived in slums that would have horrified a New York alley cat, but they appealed to the Steinbeck in me, of which there is a lot. After the fall of Saigon I returned to Asia, resumed residence for six months in my old haunts in Taipei, and studied Chinese while waiting for the next war, which didn't come. Returning overland, I took up a career of magazine free-lancing, a colorful route to starvation, with stints on various staffs interspersed. For a year I worked in Boulder, Colorado, on the staff of Soldier of Fortune magazine, half zoo and half asylum, with the intention of writing a book about it. Publishing houses said, yes, Fred, this is great stuff, but you are obviously making it up. I wasn't. Playboy eventually published it, making me extremely persona non grata at Soldier of Fortune.

Having gotten married somewhere along the way for reasons that escape me at the moment, I am now the happily divorced father of the World's Finest Daughters. Until recently I worked as, among other things, a law-enforcement columnist for the Washington Times. It allowed me to take trips to big cities and to ride around in police cars with the siren going woowoowoo and kick in doors of drug dealers. Recently I changed the column from law enforcement to technology, and now live in Mexico near Guadalajara, having found burros preferable to bureaucrats. My hobbies are wind surfing, scuba, listening to blues, swing-dancing in dirt bars, associating with colorful maniacs, weight-lifting, and people of the other sex.
My principal accomplishment in life, aside from my children, is the discovery that it is possible to jitterbug to the Brandenburgs.

[Tatnic]

Here is my high school educated plan to exit this mess you ready? I think we should build a wall dividing the country into parts. These jokers have been killing each other for hundreds of years. When this phase beings turn it over to the United Nations and begin redeployment out of theater. Have the Country divided in different states. Each region would have it’s own leader. How’s that for a plan? We will always maintain a substantial size of troops back in Saudi

I've said this before but we got suckered into that war in iraq. We waltzed right in and declared victory before the war even started. Now we're just where they want us, stuck fighting ghosts more invisible than the viet cong.

When we first went into afghanistan we wiped out the taliban in a matter of months, absolutely pummelled them and al quaeda. But now after a few years, they've dissappeared like cockroaches under the counter only to pop out and harrass us. That's where we are at this point... fighting ghosts. I say leave for a while and give em a chance to get brave and concentrated, then smash 'em again. Only the next time do it all by air and don't be so nice...ie, remember when they had the taliban leader in their gun sights but they had to ask permission to kill him, and he got away? What the f*&k...if we're gonna fight a war then lets fight and not be so polite about it.

[mrmarket]

I think war is stupid and unnecessary. But then again, no one ever picks a fight with me. It seems like the weaker and less intelligent people are always the ones who want to get into a conflict.