More From Our Uneducated Military

This is a pretty good job of reporting by writer from the NY Times. Worth a listen to see audio slide show on Times web site








KARMA, Iraq, Nov. 3 — The bullet passed through Lance Cpl. Juan Valdez-Castillo as his Marine patrol moved down a muddy urban lane. It was a single shot. The lance corporal fell against a wall, tried to stand and fell again.
His squad leader, Sgt. Jesse E. Leach, faced where the shot had come from, raised his rifle and grenade launcher and quickly stepped between the sniper and the bloodied marine. He walked backward, scanning, ready to fire.

Shielding the marine with his own thick body, he grabbed the corporal by a strap and dragged him across a muddy road to a line of tall reeds, where they were concealed. He put down his weapon, shouted orders and cut open the lance corporal’s uniform, exposing a bubbling wound.

Lance Corporal Valdez-Castillo, shot through the right arm and torso, was saved. But the patrol was temporarily stuck. The marines were engaged in the task of calling for a casualty evacuation while staring down their barrels at dozens of windows that faced them, as if waiting for a ghost’s next move.

This sequence on Tuesday here in Anbar Province captured in a matter of seconds an expanding threat in the war in Iraq. In recent months, military officers and enlisted marines say, the insurgents have been using snipers more frequently and with greater effect, disrupting the military’s operations and fueling a climate of frustration and quiet rage.

 

So saith the man who liberated all those death camps.
Whoops, that was a barefaced non-fact.

 

An amazing photograph.

It's actually amazing how much it looks like something out of recent Hollywood cinema. All the colors are fairly bleak and muted ... all of them except for the blood. It's quite stark.

 

Fenian - not sure who that shot was aimed at but don't you think snide remarks on a thread about brave Marines may be over the line? Aren't there enough other threads for your "witticisms"?

 

FB's got serious issues.

that was a good story...no matter where you stand on issues.

 

Yes, it is a good story. Too bad Boom devotes equal time to the Post.

And F_B's twitting Mr. Reagan, a protochickenhawk of the first water. Reagan served in a film unit in Hollywood during WWII, but often reminisced thereafter about having helped liberate the death camps in Europe in 1945. He did not. He was having lunch in the commisary at Warner Brothers.

He did, however, send several hundred Marines into Lebanon in 1983. A boondoggle of strategy, planning, preparation and execution, more than 200 of them were killed in a single truck bombing.

You probably shouldn't pull quotes from a president you're too young to remember.

 

Fenian thinks he's John Kerry.

 

Please, gents, know your own idol's works.
Ronald Reagan told the Israeli ambassador that he'd liberated the death camps when he had never left Hollywood for the duration of the war.

 

There are many Marines in my family and they all love that quote.

I guess you have to be clever like John Kerry to change the story here from about the Marines and their bravery to about something else.

Fenian seems to be good at that.

 

You

You threw Reagan into the mix, you silly man.
It appears that willful obtuseness is an acquired skill.

 

That being the case, shouldn't you be more upset that the lives of our Marines are being spent in service of another boondoggle?

The money quote from the cutline above:

"...fueling a climate of frustration and quiet rage."

refers to American Marines, Chris. If they're angry, why aren't you?