Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

A Marine's Response to the World's media

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • A Marine's Response to the World's media

    As a WW ll Veteran, I concur with this mans thinking and I'd tend to operate the same way if I was in that theatre of operations.
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    In response to the news blurb about the Marine who put two rounds ("double tap") in a wounded insurgent's head in Fallujah, here's a response from a Marine:

    "It's a safety issue, pure and simple. After assaulting through a target, we put a security round in everybody's head. Sorry al-Reuters, there's no paddy wagon rolling around Fallujah picking up "prisoners" and offering them a hot cup a joe, falafel, and a blanket. There's no time to dick around on the target. You clear the space, dump the chumps, and moveon.org.
    Are Corpsman expected to treat wounded terrorists? Negative. Hey libs, worried about the defense budget? Well, it would be waste, fraud, and abuse for a Corpsman to expend one man-minute or a battle dressing on a terrorist. Its much cheaper to just spend the $.02 on a 5.56mm FMJ.

    By the way, in our view, terrorists who chop off civilian's heads are not prisoners, they are carcasses. Chopping off a civilian's head is another reason why these idiots are known as "unlawful combatants." It seems that most of the world's journalists have forgotten that fact.

    Let me be very clear about this issue. I have looked around the web, and many people get this concept, but there are some stragglers.

    Here is your typical Marine sitrep (situation report): You just took fire from unlawful combatants (no uniform - breaking every Geneva Convention rule there is) shooting from a religious building attempting to use the sanctuary status of their position as protection. But you're in Fallujah now, and the Marine Corps has decided that they're not playing that game this time. That was Najaf. So you set the mosque on fire and you hose down the terrorists with small arms, launch some AT-4s (Rockets), some 40MM grenades into the building and things quiet down. So you run over there, and find some tangos (bad guys) wounded and pretending to be dead. You are aware that suicide martyrdom is like really popular with these idiots, and they think taking some Marines with them would be really cool. So you can either risk your life and your fire team's lives by having them cover you while you bend down and search a guy that you think is pretending to be dead for some reason. Most of the time these are the guys with the grenade or vest made of explosives. Also, you don't know who or what is in the next room. You're already speaking English to the rest of your fire team or squad which lets the terrorist know you are there and you are his enemy. You are speaking loud because your hearing is poor from shooting people for several days. So you know that there are many other rooms to enter, and that if anyone is still alive in those rooms, they know that Americans are in the mosque. Meanwhile (3 seconds later), you still have this terrorist (that was just shooting at you from a mosque) playing possum. What do you do? You double tap his head, and you go to the next room, that's what!!!

    What about the Geneva Convention and all that Law of Land Warfare stuff? What about it. Without even addressing the issues at hand, your first thought should be, "I'd rather be judged by 12 than carried by 6."

    Bear in mind that this tactic of double tapping a fallen terrorist is a perpetual mindset that is reinforced by experience on a minute by minute basis. Secondly, you are fighting an unlawful combatant in a Sanctuary, which is a double No-No on his part. Third, tactically you are in no position to take "prisoners" because there are more rooms to search and clear, and the behavior of said terrorist indicates that he is up to no good. No good in Fallujah is a very large place and the low end of no good and the high end of no good are fundamentally the same. Marines end up getting hurt or die. So there is no compelling reason for you to do anything but double tap this idiot and get on with the mission.

    If you are a veteran, then everything I have just written is self evident. If you are not a veteran, then at least try to put yourself in the situation. Remember, in Fallujah there is no yesterday, there is no tomorrow, there is only now. Right NOW. Have you ever lived in NOW for a week? It is really, really not easy. If you have never lived in NOW for longer than it takes to finish the big roller coaster at Six Flags, then shut your hole about putting Marines in jail for "War Crimes"."

    Froggy OUT
    Hamp
    USS LCI (L) & (G) 450
    WW ll Gator Navy

  • #2
    I think he's wrong. He's engaging in moral equivalence. I'm not okay with stooping down to the level of the terrorist.
    "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

    Comment


    • #3
      A column today by prominent neoconservative columnist Max Boot.

      http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...opinion-center

      Max Boot:
      The media aren't the enemy in Iraq

      Blaming the press for the problems in Iraq deflects the blame from where it belongs.

      January 10, 2007

      IF WE WIND UP losing the war in Iraq, as now appears likely (though not inevitable), many conservatives know who to blame: the press, or, in blogger-speak, the MSM (mainstream news media). Just as it did during the Vietnam War, a myth is likely to develop in which America's valiant fighting men and women were stabbed in the back by unpatriotic, even treasonous, reporters.

      Administration spokesmen and many soldiers have been saying for years that things aren't so bad in Iraq. "If you just watched what's happening every time there's a bomb going off in Baghdad, you'd think the whole country's aflame," Donald Rumsfeld declared for the umpteenth time just before leaving office. "But you fly over it, and that's just simply not the case."

      Such protestations are natural from someone who's likely to go down in history as Robert McNamara redux. But this refrain has been taken up by even the most sophisticated and disinterested observers on the right. James Q. Wilson, a longtime professor at Harvard, UCLA and Pepperdine, published a scathing essay in the autumn issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal in which he complained that "positive stories about progress in Iraq were just a small fraction of all the broadcasts." He went on to draw an analogy with the Tet offensive in 1968, which the press widely reported as an American failure even though it was a military defeat for North Vietnam.

      "We won the Second World War in Europe and Japan," he concluded, "but we lost in Vietnam and are in danger of losing in Iraq and Lebanon in the newspapers, magazines and television programs we enjoy."

      Actually, it's not at all clear that the Vietnam War was lost in the media. Reporters were initially gung-ho about the war; they went into opposition only after it became clear that the military and the Johnson administration had no plan for victory.

      In any case, the Tet analogy is dubious, because it is hard to find any signs of U.S. progress in the Iraq conflict comparable to the devastation the Viet Cong suffered in 1968.

      Even if you go by the Bush administration's own assessment, conditions today are bleak. In November, the Defense Department issued a congressionally mandated report that found that violence was "escalating" to "the highest [levels] on record." Meanwhile, the report found, attempts at national reconciliation have "shown little progress." In short, the apocalyptic condition of Iraq (at least of the non-Kurdish regions) is not an invention of the news media. It's reality.

      THAT ISN'T TO deny that there has been some biased, slipshod news coverage. To my mind, there has been too much emphasis on American casualties and American abuses, both of which are low by historical standards. There has been too much Baghdad-centric reporting, which slights differing conditions in outlying regions. And, of course, in Iraq, as elsewhere, media coverage inevitably focuses on daily disasters at the expense of long-term trends.

      Initially, I thought that this institutional bias toward sensationalism distorted public understanding of the war. But by now the dismal conditions on the ground have caught up with, if not surpassed, the media's bleak outlook.

      Whatever the shortcomings of some reporting, there has been a lot of first-rate coverage by a heroic corps of correspondents that has persevered in the face of terrible danger. (At least 109 journalists have been killed and many others wounded or kidnapped, making this the deadliest conflict on record for the Fourth Estate.) I am thinking of reporters such as John Burns, Dexter Filkins and Michael Gordon of the New York Times; Greg Jaffe and Michael Philips of the Wall Street Journal; Tom Ricks of the Washington Post; Tony Perry of the Los Angeles Times and former Times reporter John Daniszewski; Sean Naylor of Army Times; Bing West and Robert Kaplan of the Atlantic Monthly; and George Packer of the New Yorker. They've risked their necks to get the truth — and not, as Rumsfeld suggested, by flying over Iraq.

      If you wanted to figure out what was happening over the last four years, you would have been infinitely better off paying attention to their writing than to what the president or his top generals were saying. If we fail to achieve our goals in Iraq — which the administration defines as a "unified, stable, democratic and secure nation" — it won't be the fault of the ink-stained wretches or even their blow-dried TV counterparts. To argue otherwise deflects blame from those who deserve it, in the upper echelons of the administration and the armed forces. Perhaps that's the point.
      "So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

      Comment


      • #4
        Originally posted by shek View Post
        I think he's wrong. He's engaging in moral equivalence. I'm not okay with stooping down to the level of the terrorist.
        Not only that, Shek. What this guy seems to be advocating is totally counterproductive, especially with the medias around.

        The guy who wrote this is either a Marine wannabe (my guess), or some bloke who should simply NOT be in the Corps.
        Last edited by Shipwreck; 11 Jan 07,, 01:51.

        Comment

        Working...
        X