To: The Usual “Give peace a chance” ‘Tards
From: Sgt. Mom
Re: Pseuds, Wanna-Be’s and War Crimes
1. Once more I take my trusty pen in hand and do my best to advise skepticism as regards your choice in “Exhibit A” in this year’s “Anti-war Veteran Sweepstakes!” (Film at 11!) Again, you seem to be hastily embracing yet another so-called veteran with a certain taste for resume-enhancing. Well, they are a useful part of your public witnesses to the horror and waste of it all… salt to taste, people, salt to taste.
2. You are, of course, entitled to believe whatever you please, of someone who makes himself out to be a former member of a trained, selective and elite band of warriors, driven to madness by the horrors he was forced to participate in during our brutal and unjustified war in Vietnam…. Oops, sorry, dozed off there, thought I was watching an old episode of China Beach… where was I? Oh, trained, elite, hard-core… ever wonder why they appear to be such mentally-unbalanced, undisciplined, unsuccessful, scummy dirt bags, after their service in supposedly elite, selective units? Well, seriously, some of us do, even if you don’t. Your latest very public anti-war veteran…oh, dear, what to say about his credibility, except that you’d better start screening these losers, or you’ll have even less of it. Hint: DD214. What they did, and where, and how long, and with what unit, and what decs and awards they got for it, it’ll all be there. Really. Try it, you’ll be blown away… err, but in the non-military, non-explosive sense.
3. Here’s the thing: for those who were not paying attention in the first class. The military is not some huge, impersonal machine; it’s a series of very tightly controlled, interlinked communities. In a startlingly large number of them, if you stick around for more than an enlistment or two, everyone in said community knows everyone else, or has at least heard of them. And no matter where you go, and what you do, there are always other people there with you: Over you in command, under you as your subordinates, on either side of you as your peers and comrades. There are always other people there, who will remember strange and unusual events, especially of the possibility of a criminal investigation is involved. And the more recent the events, the easier it is to locate all of them. The internet greatly facilitates this process, as Micah Wright will no doubt attest.
4. Here’s another thing for you to consider at your next casting call; it’s very, very hard for a non-veteran to fake military experience and qualifications, and for the average single-hitch enlistee, almost as hard to fake very specialized, elite qualifications and experience. Veterans and serving military members, especially those of long-service, are extremely observant about all sorts of tiny clues in dress and bearing, deportment and language, about all sorts of service-specific arcane knowledge. And the more specialized the service, and the more selective the intake, and the more confined to specific times and places… well, the result will be a very specific pool of people who will either back up tales of extraordinarily events, or debunk them in with extreme attention to detail. Your choice, of course.
5. Jesse MacBeth is not the first anti-war veteran to add a lot of “interesting” qualifications to his resume, and not the last, not as long as you lot line up with your mouths all a-gape like a lot of baby birds, eager to be fed a heaping helping of crappy, easily-disproved, regurgitated fake atrocity stories. Take a swig of the Kool-Aid, people, it’ll take the taste of all that crap out of your mouth. Just ‘cause you want it to be true, don’t make it so.
6. Seriously, next time you feel this impulse to speak war-veteran truth to military power, spare yourself some heartburn, and go over the DD214s with a calendar, a map, some DOD Public Affairs releases, and maybe some reality-based military veterans. Really, you’ll be all the better for it
Sincerely,
Sgt. Mom
An actor studies the character he will portray, a con man studies his marks.
Comment by Bill — 20060523 @ 1140
Give peace a chance.
We do.
It keeps leading to war that is generally worse than if we had just come down hard in the first place.
Comment by Michael — 20060523 @ 1344
The second I saw the guy’s picture my BS meter pegged. It’s still pegged, I think all the diodes blew. So unfortunately I could not get a scientifically accurate analysis of the guy’s story and had to rely on a subjective seat of the pants assessment.
Now the seat of my pants is pegged, too.
Whadda maroon.
What I don’t understand is why this clown would pull such an idiotic stunt, he couldn’t have possibly believed it would stand up for more than six seconds. I suspect his audience is not “regular” people, but the poo flinging moonbats on the far left who will believe this story no matter how thoroughly discredited it is. You know the types, they’re the ones who believe a lie, such as the Mapes/Rather forgeries, can contain a deeper truth even if false.
People will say “Okay, so maybe this particular person is not telling the actual, precisely literal truth at this instant about this exact subject, but that doesn’t mean that his story is false!” Then we’ll hear about meta-narratives and other such nonsense, and maybe about how truth is subjective.
Comment by Steve Skubinna — 20060523 @ 1947
As soon as I saw the post on Blackfive detailing just the uniform mistakes, I knew the guy was completely bogus. How?
Because I’ve seen how my son takes care of his uniform. My son - who never picked up an iron in his life, actually IRONED his uniform. I saw him hunt for a ruler to pin his medals on straight and the proper distance apart (he only had the two awards from basic then). I saw him spend several hours working on his new beret so it would lay right. I saw him hang up his flight uniform with the boots placed neatly under it while he was home on R&R. All things I would have bet anyone a month’s salary I would never see my son do.
After all that, I simply do NOT believe that any Service Member whether current or not, would make such egregious uniform mistakes. It would never happen. Mainly because the guy would KNOW that everyone and their brother would be after him for even a small mistake. They’d never let the big ones pass unnoticed!
And if he can’t even wear the uniform properly, how in the world is he going to convince me that he was in an elite unit.
Comment by Teresa — 20060523 @ 2129
Sgt. Mom -
It’s not a surprise they didn’t question his veracity. They’re getting EXACTLY what they want with someone like this. He’s PERFECT. He’s telling them EXACTLY what they KNOW is going on - atrocities, horror, the whole nine yards of the stuff they’ve convinced themselves of - WE are the bad guys, he’s confirming it! Hurray!
Why would they question it? And it’s not even like they know enough about the military to find it even a trifle odd that this guy at 22 (?) managed to go through basic, go through Ranger school (a time consuming thing in itself, I understand) spend 16 months in Iraq and then get processed for a medical discharge a year or two ago? What’d they do, press-gang him into the Army when he was 16? (Whoops, apparently - I’ve seen some comments that he was given the choice between enlisting in the military or going to jail - like any recruiter would even TOUCH someone like that these days…)
They didn’t notice he doesn’t seem to have the upper-body musculature that seems to be the norm in pictures I’ve seen of Rangers. Or that his uniform was so far off the mark that it could have come from random selections at a surplus store.
Why should they even suspect him? They have willfully and diligently avoided even the possibility of being exposed to a clue when it comes to military matters. They’re pure as the driven snow (or so they think) - and ready to believe any con man that came down the pike.
The first rule of a con man is to figure out what the mark really, really wants. Then you figure out what it takes to convince them to bite.
This guy had them convinced. They bit. I wonder how much he tapped them for - or was it just an attempt for him to get his fifteen minutes of fame?
BTW, I checked out a DU thread on this. It’s now an official, bona-fide Rovian plot to discredit the peace movement. The dude was planted, man, that’s the only thing that explains it. Their own gullibility doesn’t figure into it at all.
J.
Comment by JLawson — 20060524 @ 1339
If it were the machinations of the Dark Lord Rove, he would have lasted a hell of a lot longer than 24 hours under mil-blog scrutiny.
It does not say anything at all favorable about their own powers of intelligent scepticism, though… I wonder how many of them answer Nigerian scam e-mails?
That was your own d**k you just trod heavily upon, DUers, and you did it all yourselves. Your mothers must be so proud.
Comment by Sgt. Mom — 20060524 @ 1654