Okay so here is my new thing. I think that I should be allowed to carry a cricket bat and hit anyone who says something stupid like, "this isn't a combat zone it is garrison." If it isn't a combat zone, why do I get hazard pay jackass? Or anyone that does anything to hurt the effort to fight the war. This is why we are fighting the war on terror, and not winning it. So if you are an assclown, I should be allowed to hit you with a cricket bat. Where I hit and how hard I hit will be dictated by how big of an assclown you are or the level of assclownery what you said or did was.
Here are my recent examples. Yesterday I was walking along one of the main roads on post and saw a Lieutenant Colonel stop a Sergeant because he was driving his gator without safety goggles. There is a war on, and all he thinks it is important enough to stop this guy, yell at him, and force him to park his gator on the side of the road and walk back for glasses. If you have nothing more important to do then mess with a soldier, you need to go home. There are people actively fighting the bad guys, and we have far too many people here who just sit around and look for things to correct people on.
Now I understand that it is a rule, and rules must be followed. However, he could have told the guy that he should drive back and get the goggles or some jackass will yell at him. He didn't have to make the guy look stupid. And when we get right down to it, what is the worst that could happen? A rock could get in his eye and he drives into a ditch. To me, that is on the scale of act of God. And if God wants you, God gets you.
We have to wear gloves, goggles, and use a drip pan to fill up vehicles. Now I consider myself a big boy, and I can follow big boy rules. I have been putting fuel in gas tanks for almost 20 years. I have never needed to wear gloves at the gas station. As it turns out I have had 20 accident free years at the gas station. Not only that, I have never heard of anyone ever having any kind of accident that wearing of gloves would have prevented or protected from injury. As it turns out I can tell if there is gasoline on my hands and I can wash it off all by myself. I understand the need for the drip pan because refueling trucks in the military do not have the automatic shut off. You have to be a big boy and pay attention. However the pumps we have here do shut off when it is full, so the drip pan is redundant.
What we have is a situation where the rules we have, need to be reevaluated. Some are still needed, and some are downright stupid. In a combat zone they order people to wear a reflective belt across their bodies. Can someone tell me the reason we wear camouflaged uniforms? If we are going to stand out like idiots at night, why try to hide in the first place. Granted, they don't wear them in the field, but why do I need a reflective device to walk down a sidewalk. If vehicles are driving on the sidewalk, I think we have bigger problems. And if someone cannot get out of the way of a vehicle with headlights on that is traveling 10 miles an hour, I think that is natural selection at work, and why are we trying to stop that?
Here is my plan to cover the risk, look both ways when crossing the street asshole. If you can't do that and judge when you should cross, then maybe getting run over isn't a bad idea.
I was at the bazaar just looking around, and I saw these soldiers in full battle rattle. Helmets, body armor, and decked out rifles. Each M4 had the rails, and cool grips with the cool guy optics, one even had the infra red laser on it. So these guys were fully ready to bring the ruckus on anyone that would dare to attack us, with one exception. None had magazine in their weapons and they were slung across their backs. So what was the point?
Here is one you are going to love. When printing psychological operations product or IO messages we are no longer allowed to refer to the enemy as "Taliban." The reason is that in the Pashtun language talib means student and taliban means students, so if we call the enemy "Taliban" then we are referring to all students in Afghanistan. Somehow I don't think that third graders are thinking that we are telling them to lay down their weapons and surrender.
An officer (he actually has a job) simply said that a good rule is to call the enemy that he calls himself. Now that makes sense, but someone assclown made a rule to justify his purpose in life, and now we are tying our own hands behind our backs.
This is exactly why I had to get out of the military. The Army isn't for guys like me anymore. I actually want to WIN the war on terror. And here is another example of why we won't ever do that.
Last night I was talking to some guy about a recent attack on the bad guys. It was sweet, over 100 bad guys (for the record this is on open source now so I can talk about it) were walking along a trail from Pakistan to Afghanistan. As soon as they crossed the border we lit them up. This is a great thing for us for a number of reasons.
1. We can finally prove to Pakistan that bad guys are coming from Pakistan into Afghanistan
2. We killed a bunch of bad guys without any danger to American/Coalition forces
3. Good guy lives were saved by taking out the bad guys.
So I was happy all the way around. We knew they were bad guys because they were packing some serious weaponry. For me, this is a good thing. The bad guys are willing to die, and we helped them with that. The part that I think sucks is that they had been walking all night when they got lit up, so it is kind of like adding insult to injury, after a long march and you are tired, that is when you get shot up. Of course I didn't feel bad about it, it actually made me laugh harder.
So this guy I was talking to asked one question. He wanted to know how many were actual bad guys and how many were forced into fighting for the Taliban? To him we should not drop bombs on people when we do not know their motivation. Of course he did not have a solution for determining that, but he thought it was wrong to kill them indiscriminately. I thought it was very purposeful, we kill the guys with guns.
Now I understand grabbing a guy out of his house at night, give him a weapon and telling him that if he doesn't help you with an ambush that night, you will kill his family. That guy I feel sorry for, or I would if I had a conscience. For me, he has a weapon so he can fight the person threatening him. But a guy who marches into Pakistan, trains, and then marches back, I think his motivation is pretty clear.
Here is a tip on having an exchange of ideas with me. If you have no facts, shut up. If I have facts, don't dismiss them because you don't have any thought on how to dispute them. And be prepared for me to throw the bullshit flag for when you are full of it, and as an additional tip, don't take it personal. You got caught talking out your ass, it isn't my fault you are got caught, you were stupid enough to engage in the debate when you didn't know shit.
To support part of my argument I related a story of actual event. His response was that I was telling him of a case study. I had facts of actual events of how Americans have handled a specific situation in the past, and he had no facts of a similar situation where it was mishandled, so he dismissed my point offhand.
That means I get to it him with a cricket bat. It is people like him that are the reason we are not winning the war on terror. We tie our own hands behind our backs. In the current military actions we are dealing with some of the worst people in known history. Yet we treat them with kid gloves.
What the people who are against the war do not realize is that the people overseas do not see them as allies, they see them as Americans. Go ahead and protest the war in Iraq and actually be IN Iraq. Here is what is going to happen, your ass will be taken from the street and you will be on video in an orange jumpsuit in about ten minutes. Go to villages and ask the bad guys what their motivation is, are they wanting to fight or being forced to. You know what will happen then? You will be in an orange jumpsuit in no time.
Now the guy I was talking to wasn't against the war, he just thought it should be handled differently. Here is my thought. A few years ago the Taliban were dragging woman onto midfield of a soccer stadium during halftime and cutting their heads off. This was a regular practice. Now I am not saying that there is no woman on the planet that does not deserve capital punishment, but I doubt in Taliban ruled Afghanistan that there were many women that were committing what any rational person would call capital crimes.
I did not know any of those women, but they were the mothers, daughters, and sisters of many people who were helpless to stop it. I do not know any of those people either. But if it was me, I would want someone to do something about it, and I am sure that there were people who wanted that level of madness to stop. I am willing to be one of those people. That is what we are all about, we protect those that cannot protect themselves. Say what you want about the military, but we haven't been taking the oil from Iraq to keep the oil prices in America low. If we are fighting for oil, when will we actually get it?
Okay I admit, I covered a few things here. Deal with it. What it comes down to is I think that if you are saying or doing stuff that hurts the war effort, and you are a person who is supposed to be fighting the war, I get to hit you with a cricket bat. Now all I have to do is get someone to send me one, and I will be in business.
