Why aren't the forces able to go after the people who are killing our soldiers...?
SF has been conducting continuous night OPS in that area to take out ambushers. But all of our units need to also counter-attack when fired on.
Here is an e-mail from one SF operator in the AO that was forwarded to me today...
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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.
(Sentence deleted) 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 neighborhood. 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.
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-deleted) . . . 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. |
