Beauchamp update

This is still going on? Yesiree. No links to the right-wing rampage (at Drudge, Ace of Spades, etc) but they've been claiming SB recanted. Of course in the end it turns out that it's the Army's manipulation of information, selective leaking of documents, and Big Brother monitoring of his conversations. TNR report here.

Army of Dude

Army of Dude - One of the few remaining milbloggers the army hasn't yet shut down. A recent post:

What has been bothering me this whole deployment is the brevity and formality in which the media handles the death of soldiers. It always goes, “PFC John Smith, Norman, Oklahoma, killed by enemy small arms fire in Baghdad. Assigned to 1/43 Engineers, Third Infantry Division.” What a crock to read that in a paper. It would be wholly appropriate to dedicate a full color photo and a real biography in every paper in America. The anonymity of dead soldiers would evaporate and the public would be forced to look at the faces of the fallen. Would it set in progress change? Perhaps. It certainly would go to show that we’re out here every day, dying for an ideal long forgotten. As for me, I started to sign these entries with my initials long ago to avoid detection by superiors. I could and still can get in trouble for what I’ve written. Lately this blog has been passed around to dudes of every rank, and those who would be punishing me have become readers. So it’s no longer necessary to be sneaky and secretive, another anonymous soldier. My name is Alex Horton, and I’m a 22 year old from Frisco, Texas. I can recite Pulp Fiction line by line and my favorite color is blue. I want to be a journalist when I grow up, and I want to see every part of the world. For the first time in my life I’m an avid reader. Fifteen months here has been fifteen months away from Lauren, the girl I’m crazy about. This wouldn’t be much of a blog without her, as she’s the inspiration for anything creative coming out of me, my beautiful muse.

In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic.

Herbert Hoover said, "Older men declare war. But it is the youth who must fight and die." These are the young men we can’t afford to go without. Brian Chevalier and Jesse Williams, George Bush and Secretary Gates, we’re all flesh and blood. Every life is sacred. You probably don’t know the names of the first two. But you should.

Makes me cry. This guy and other like him are the Eric Maria Remarques of our time, and I can only hope that it's him and not the Ernst Jungers who influence how this war is interpreted here after it's over.

Another recent post describes the juxtaposition of meaning and meaninglessness experienced by a self-aware soldier with the soul of a writer:

This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second. It’s maddening to think that more than a year’s worth of blood, sweat and tears will lead to little more than a pat on the back and a hideously redundant speech from someone who did none of the bleeding, sweating or crying.

Despite being in a meaningless situation, my life has never had this much meaning. I watch the backs of my friends and they do the same for me. I’ve killed to protect them, and they’ve killed to protect me. For friends and family, being deployed is like being pregnant or surviving a car wreck; everyone is nice to you all of a sudden. People I don’t even know send me kind words and packages from all over. They came out of the woodwork knowing my plight and shared with me heartfelt hope and luck. The fact that you’re reading this now, dear reader, is a testament to that. Would you have cared about what I thought, felt or did two years ago? This position I’m in, shared by less than one percent of the U.S. population, has given me the distinct privilege of sharing my experiences and ruminations of this war, observations undiluted by perpetually delirious officials like General Petreaus and mainstream media sirens. I have felt every extreme of the human condition, physically, morally and emotionally. I’ve never laughed so hard, cried so long or felt more ashamed of myself in all of my life. In a matter of weeks it’ll be over, and I’ll have just the memories of enduring 130 degree heat, and poker games lasting well into the night. I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

We need to bring him and his brothers home for good. Now.

'Shock Troop' supported

TNR did their investigation, the story held up.

I found the last bit rather revealing:

Although we place great weight on the corroborations we have received, we wished to know more. But, late last week, the Army began its own investigation, short-circuiting our efforts. Beauchamp had his cell-phone and computer taken away and is currently unable to speak to even his family. His fellow soldiers no longer feel comfortable communicating with reporters.

And this of course is the goal of the right-wing outrage machine: to silence real reports coming out of Iraq so that all we have to rely on is government propaganda. Like how they banned soldier blogs. That's their goal in all this.

more reaction "shocks"

More on the Shock Troops controversy. On the one hand, it's frustrating to go through the hyper-analysis exercise every time the right wing hears something it doesn't like (see Crooked Timber's "One Endless Rathergate", and Jon Swift's comprehensive roundup of winger crybabiness).

On another hand, such controversies occasion really interesting bits of writing, like this one from a semiotics professor who sees in "Thomas"s prose style a poseur type of wanna-be bad boy who evidently infests MFA programs.

And some of the comments on threads like these are just gold. It's an amazing new world when there is so much expertise on so many subjects available for exchange.

One former military guy expresses what's been my take all along (without the real-world cred to back it up, but hey, I read a lot):

Having spent 22 years in the Army, I can say with some emphasis that there is almost nothing that most privates, and NOTHING that some privates, won't do, including incredibly stupid, hitting-self-in-head-with-hammer type of things. So the idea that this stuff didn't happen because "they wouldn't do it"? don't make me laugh.

And remember, you're talking about a bunch of 19-year-old guys with guns in a pretty much broken down Third World country. If your squad leader/PSG/1SG are weak, bored, stupid or distracted? Let the fun begin!

Tillman's diary

Pat Tillman's death is still in the news.

But here's another interesting detail: He kept a diary. And his diary was destroyed after his death. That's evidence alone that something was fishy. And it almost gets you to believe the conspiracies that he was killed on purpose... if not by Bush's many minions (which I doubt), then by someone in his unit who did something he didn't want made known. We may never know, which is exactly how they wanted it.

For some reason this makes me feel even worse than when I heard of his death in the first place. I guess because I never would have met him, and so he as a person is somewhat disembodied. But a book he would have published, or had published after his death, is far more real to me. I've read so many war diaries, autobiographies, veterans' novels, etc ... so losing this one is like one of those never existed. Would this have been another All Quiet on the Western Front? A Jarhead? Catch 22? Slaughterhouse Five? Adventures of a Simpleton? The world will never know.

Afghan Garden of Eden

One of the few green spots in Afghanistan... Sandbox blog post describes conflict between Pashtun and nomadic Cuchies that starts when Cuchie horse drinks from Pashtun oasis.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2007/04/the_garden_of_e.html

Author worries that it could have turned into another Mai Lai massacre of civilians - and if it had, he would have been responsible!

The Termite Mound

Blog post at The Sandbox - Doonesbury's military blog for soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. This one describes conditions at a combat outpost in baghdad - very WWI-like conditions it seems.

http://gocomics.typepad.com/the_sandbox/2007/04/the_termite_mou.html

Ends with news coming down that DoD has unilaterally extended rotations to 15 months... they find out through Yahoo news, not from the military itself. And they know some of them will die because of that decision.