THOSE PISSED OFF SOLDIERS ON 60 MINUTES

I'm a vet so I've been there done that. From the time I set foot on the train headed for boot camp til the day I was discharged I pissed and moaned about everything everywhere. And so did everybody else; the uniforms were lame, the food was shit, the guns didn't work, the ammo was defective, the whores were too ugly, the officers were assholes, and more than anything else, getting killed was not an attractive fringe benefit.

Today, our frame of reference for soldier bitching can only go back to WWII, but the guys had plenty to bitch about back then, and they did. The Sherman Tank was a death trap and everybody knew it; no armor, guns too small with no way to get cool inside; but there were no pro-Nazi TV people to pass along the complaints. Until he died in the 70s, one of my uncles was still bitching about the asshole tactics in the Pacific, tactics that resulted in tens of thousands of needless casualties because of frontal attacks on islands that could have been blockaded and the enemy left to starve. You don't think good old Ike didn't totally fuck up the landings on Omaha Beach? That he wasn't 100% responsible for the Battle of the Bulge which cost us 80,000 needless casualties? And you don't think that a least a quarter of the guys didn't know it? But there weren't the "eager to sabotage our government" reporters and media to broadcast the complaints in those days.

I don't know if the guys on 60 Minutes represented the normal ten to fifteen percent of vocal malcontents that are in every army, or if they represent forty percent of the soldiers who think we are wasting our time there. What we all know is that CBS, and all MSM, has been lying about Iraq almost since day one, so we have to be dammed careful to analyze whatever propaganda emanates from that shit pile. It seems that the "soldiers" are a front group funded by the usual suspects and directed by a guy named David Fenton who is almost always involved in impenetrable daisy chain of Left wing fronts, which are so complex that it's very tough to figure what he's doing.

BUT, according to Mudville, at least one of the complainers is a fake; never been to Iraq. And he has more. I haven't hit all the Mil Bloggers yet, I'll link if I see anything else. In From the Cold (Ex Spook) has really looked into the composition of the complainers and the stacked survey by the anti-war Gannett newspapers. Spook:

But in reality, the group is an astro-turf movement, backed by a high-powered public relations firm in D.C. (Fenton Communications), which promotes the anti-war organization and arranges media "opportunities." Funding for the P.R. effort appears to come from big-money leftist groups like Moveon.org and the Fourth Freedom Forum, which are also Fenton clients.

In addition the CBS "reporter," Logan, apparently used Al Qaeda footage she claimed was her own when she tried to foist another story on 60 Minutes. Don't do a Duke lacrosse on this, get some facts first.

Blackfive has a terrific entry on a POV about the surge and some Iraqi POVs. In fact the Congresswoman interviewed articulates a POV that closely resembles my own and probably most yours as well.