Iraq and the Military
tqa | August 26, 2009
PZ called my attention to the fact that former US Army 2nd Lieutenant William Calley has, for the first time, publicly apologized for his conduct at My Lai. Something that Paul wrote got me thinking, particularly while I was running some errands on base this morning:
There is no doubt that Calley was a bad man and a weak man -- he was the lieutenant who led the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 -- but at the same time, he was one of the pawns in a game dictated at the highest levels of American policy.
I'm absolutely certain that PZ is at least half right - at a time and in…
tqa | January 30, 2008
It's safe to say that 2007 wasn't the best year of US Army 1st Lt. Elizabeth Whiteside's life. She started off the year with a bullet wound to her torso that damaged, among other things, one lung, her liver, and her spleen. She ended her year as an outpatient at Walter Reed, waiting for her superiors to decide whether or not she would have to stand court-martial for inflicting that wound upon herself. In between, she had to recover from her physical wounds, learn to deal with the inner demons that led to them, she had to deal with superior officers who believed that she would be more…
tqa | October 16, 2007
I am certainly no fan of the Iraq war, but I found it difficult to read the media reports about retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's recent comments on the war without getting angry. Reading the full text of his remarks took me from anger to outrage. As good as it is to hear an unvarnished, blunt assessment of the situation from someone who, as a former commander of the forces in Iraq, is very familiar with what happens there, I'm left wondering where the hell he was before he gave his little talk.
Let's look at some of what the little pissant had to say:
Since 2003, the politics…
tqa | September 12, 2007
Staff Sergeant Yance T. Gray and Sergeant Omar Mora died on Monday in a vehicle crash in Baghdad on Monday, along with six other American soldiers and two "detainees." During their time in Iraq, both Gray and Mora displayed more than just the courage needed to face the enemy. They also displayed the courage needed to stand up, to face the country, and to say that the strategy in Iraq isn't working, and never will. They had the courage to say this, knowing that their opinion would not be well received by many of their superiors. And, ultimately, they had the courage and civic responsibility…