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Letter from Iraq – source not confirmed
Hey Guys, sorry it's been so long since I've sent anything but a quick note to
you individually. However things have been pretty hectic since the end of
hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the assholes in the
press like to say over and over:
1) We did expect some armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen;
2) It isn't any worse than expected;
3) Things are getting better each day, and
4) The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal bitching and griping.
My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had the cajones to
be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is probably over, especially
since we are back being criticized by the same Roland Headly types that used to
hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his
ridiculous B.S.
I'm in Baghdad now, since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar. It looks, sounds
and smells about the same but at least you can get Maker's Mark at the local OC.
We came up in mid-June to help set up operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It
represents a major (and long overdue) shift in tactics. Instead of being sitting
ducks for the ragheads we now are going after the worthless pieces of fecal
matter. [OD NOTE: VERY understated!]
I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams from the
networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A teams, seeking,
finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are well-armed, well-paid (in
U.S. dollars) and always waiting to wail for the press and then shoot some GI in
the back in the midst of a crowd.
The only reason the GIs are pissed (not demoralized) is that they cannot touch,
must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream in their faces and riot
on cue when they spot a camera man from ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did,
then they know the next nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and
how much the Iraqi people hate us.
Some do. But the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs don't
start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very compassionate, especially to
kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not
return fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians out
of harms way. So did the Iraqis.
A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human shields. The GIs
surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they
discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough guys throwing
her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her
and her mother to the nearest field hospital. The
Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem in that neighborhood
since. How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported
in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada.
The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local
teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions about
America and now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T-shirts, Dockers (or even
better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the
"swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the GIs play it on their radios. They
participate less and less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a
wannabe bad-ass shows up in the eighborhood. The younger kids are going back to
school again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about the Koran ten hours
a day, and they get a hot meal. They see the same GIs who man the corner
checkpoint, helping clear the playground, install new swingsets and create
soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids playing baseball in one playground,
under the supervision of a couple of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good
but were having fun, probably more than most Little Leaguers
The place is still a mess but most of it has been for years. But the Hospitals
are open and are in the process of being brought into the 21st Century. The MOs
and visiting surgeons from home are teaching their docs new techniques and One
American pharmaceutical company (you know, the kind that all the hippies like to
scream about as greedy) donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies
for a year. Safe water is more available. Electricity has been restored to
pre-war levels but saboteurs keep cutting The lines. And The old Ba'ath big
shots are upset because they can't get fuel for their private generators. One
actually complained to General McKeirnan, who told him it was a rough world.
The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing the ones that
weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they did in East Berlin,
Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols of Iraqi cops and
U.S./U.K./Polish MPs now in most of the larger cities. Basra has 3.5 million
inhabitants. Mosul is a city of 2 million. Kirkuk has 1 million. How many and
hundreds of other small towns have not had riots or shootings? The vast
majority.
The six U.K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the ex-cops they were
re-habbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I talked to, the town now has
about twenty permanent vacancies in its police force. Mick, he's a big potato
eater from Belfast named Huggins and knows how to handle terrorists after twenty
years fighting with the IRA. He sends his regards and says he'd love to have
you here. Thinks you'd make a great police chief, even though the cops would be
more frightened of you than the local
hoods (then he laughed)
I heard one doofus on MSNBC the other night talk about how "nearly 60" GIs have
been killed since 01 May. The truth is that 21 GIs have been killed in combat,
mostly from ambush, from 01 May through 30 June, Another 29 have been killed by
accidents or other causes (two drowned while swimming in the Tigris).
The [MSNBC turd] is the same jerk who reported on the air that "dozens of GIs"
were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an Engineer Battalion
that was parked by a construction site. The truck was hit and burned, three GIs
received minor injuries (including the driver who burnt his hand) and three
warriors of Allah were promptly sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise.
Hell of a way to get laid.
A mosque in that shithole Fallujah blew up this morning while the local imam, a
creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths that frequently
appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member teach eight teenagers how to
make belt bombs. Right away the local Feyhadeen propaganda group started
wailing that the Americans hit it with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't
have been any mosque left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN
and BBC. One fool was dragging around a piece of tin with blood on it, claiming
it was part of the missile.
The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one of my
guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually wore around his
face that made him look like a girl. He was a local leader of the Feyhadeen.
We took the clown in custody and were asked rather indignantly by the twit from
BBC if we were trying to shut up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and
friends blown up." I told the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew
Arabic (which he obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested
we take him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a cell
with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him to
headquarters. They declined the invitation. Guess what played on the Bullshit
Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a mosque? See the
poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing his mosque and relatives?
Yep. Our friend the Palestinian.
Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters and
generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah. The only thing that
frightens them more is hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is out that a trip to
Guantanimo Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they usually start squealing like
the little mice they are, when an interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No wonder the
International Red Cross, the National Council of Churches and the French keep
protesting about the place. They know it has
proven to be very effective in keeping several hundred real fanatical
psychopaths in check and very frankly would rather see them cut loose to go kill
some more GIs or innocent Americans, just to make W. look bad.
We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park them in
the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a couple of Bradleys
pointed their way, if they decide to riot. Maybe a few will get to Gitmo but
most are human garbage that wouldn't take on your five-year old grandson
face-to-face. The more we go after them and not vice-versa I think
we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah, they'll get lucky now and then,
but it's showtime, fellows.
Our first objective is to get the die-hards off the street (or make them too
scared to come out in them) and destroy their caches of weapons (we have
collected more than 227,000 AK-47s and that is only the tip of the iceburg;
Curly bought nearly a million of them from our pal Vladimir), then cut off their
money supply, mostly from Syria and Lebanon. We must continue to get public
services up and running, so the local families can get water, sewage and garbage
service; electricity, public transportation; oil fields and
refineries working and a dinar that won't halve in value every month.
It's going to be a long haul (remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and West
Germany) but if we don't stick with it, nobody else will, and we'll have some
other looney running the place again.
This place has greater potential than Saudi Arabia (bunch of goat-herders who
struck black gold) or Iran (weird dudes who can't run a rug bazaar much less a
major country).
I keep telling myself even the Democrats can't be that self-destructive. But
then I look at the current line-up. The cream of the crap. If that lying
lesbian bitch ever gets elected we're really in trouble. [OD NOTE: AAAAMEN!!!
Very precise & correct description of the scummy Sen from NY.] By we, I mean the
whole world. She'll slide just plain Bill in as the Secretary-General of the
U.N. and then the whole world will be trying to take our great country . . . the
greatest ever (and that's coming from an
ex-Canuck) . . . down and civilization with it.
Armageddon, here we come. Remember, it's located on the outskirts of Jerusalem.
Enough of that cheery speculation. The good news is that General Schoonmaker is
going to appointed Chief Army and the old man is coming to Tampa to run the
SpOps desk at CentComm. He's tops and will be getting his second star. To me it
means that SpOps will be more predominant in future operations and after 18
years as a GB maybe I'll have a shot at a bird-level combat command. The old
man asked me to come to MacDill and be his ACS but I told him after I spent four
months changing the diapers of the media types, I wanted to go back to action.
Hence, my current gig. As the movie quoted old General Patton, "God help me, I
love it." I do. Nothing more satisfying than working with the BEST damn
soldiers in the world, flushing real human poop down the drain and giving some
folks a chance at trying freedom for a change. They may learn to like it and
then my great-great-grandson won't have to worry about some maniac trying to
destroy the planet.
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