Another bogus soldier story - anything to discredit the troops
A call by the Weekly Standard to vet an anonymous article has been floating out there in the blogosphere for a few days, and there’s already been plenty of commentary by the milblogging world. However, I’ve been tied up for the last couple of days and haven’t had my crack at it, so here goes.The New Republic has an article by a “soldier serving in Iraq” going by a pseudonym of Scott Thomas describing his experiences in that war. We don’t know Thomas’ rank, but we do know he is a junior enlisted soldier. Or, at least that’s what the New Republic is saying. This would all be well and good, except that “Thomas” is throwing out some stories that are obviously bulls**t.
Here’s some excerpts from the article in question, pulled from the Weekly Standard.
The first episode puts “Thomas”’s unit at a “chow hall” at an unnamed base. A woman eating there is wearing “an unrecognizable tan uniform, so I couldn’t really tell whether she was a soldier or a civilian contractor.” The woman’s face is described as having been “more or less melted, along with all the hair on that side of her head,” by an IED. She sits down for lunch next to the men. Here’s how “Thomas” describes what happens next:
We were already halfway through our meals when she arrived. After a minute or two of eating in silence, one of my friends stabbed his spoon violently into his pile of mashed potatoes and left it there.
“Man, I can’t eat like this,” he said.
“Like what?” I said. “Chow hall food getting to you?”
“No—with that fucking freak behind us!” he exclaimed, loud enough for not only her to hear us, but everyone at the surrounding tables. I looked over at the woman, and she was intently staring into each forkful of food before it entered her half-melted mouth.
“Are you kidding? I think she’s fucking hot!” I blurted out.
“What?” said my friend, half-smiling.
“Yeah man,” I continued. “I love chicks that have been intimate—with IEDs. It really turns me on—melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses . . . .”
“You’re crazy, man!” my friend said, doubling over with laughter. I took it as my cue to continue.
“In fact, I was thinking of getting some girls together and doing a photo shoot. Maybe for a calendar? ‘IED Babes.’ We could have them pose in thongs and bikinis on top of the hoods of their blown-up vehicles.”
My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing. The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall, her half-finished tray of food nearly falling to the ground.
Where to start…
First, everyone in the military wears the same uniforms, depending on the branch of service. They all have the branch of service on them, and they all carry a gun of some sort, so this business about not knowing if she was in the military or not is a load of crap. Even Department of Defense contractors, who sometimes wear uniforms, have some sort of insignia on the front that says who they are with (and they don’t carry weapons). The only exceptions to this rule are some of the Special Forces types, but even they are pretty recognizable - and they all still carry guns wherever they go.
Next, few people call dining facilities “chow halls”. The common vernacular is “DFAC” in Iraq.
Also, I can’t imagine soldiers, who know they may be facing an IED themselves, would treat a comrade-in-arms this way. It’s entirely possible for dumb people to say dumb things, but I can’t imagine this incident not being reported by someone to those soldiers’ chain of command with consequences to follow.
Finally, I find it hard to believe that someone that severely injured would still be in Iraq and not back in the States receiving treatment.
Here’s another piece, also pulled from the Weekly Standard:
The next episode is every bit as shocking. Indeed, the behavior it describes is a clear violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The author claims that his unit stumbled across a mass grave filled with the remains of Iraqi children, and, rather than report the find, chose to desecrate the corpses:
About six months into our deployment, we were assigned a new area to patrol, southwest of Baghdad. We spent a few weeks constructing a combat outpost, and, in the process, we did a lot of digging. At first, we found only household objects like silverware and cups. Then we dug deeper and found children’s clothes: sandals, sweatpants, sweaters. Like a strange archeological dig of the recent past, the deeper we went, the more personal the objects we discovered. And, eventually, we reached the bones. All children’s bones: tiny cracked tibias and shoulder blades. We found pieces of hands and fingers. We found skull fragments. No one cared to speculate what, exactly, had happened here, but it was clearly a Saddam-era dumping ground of some sort.
One private, infamous as a joker and troublemaker, found the top part of a human skull, which was almost perfectly preserved. It even had chunks of hair, which were stiff and matted down with dirt. He squealed as he placed it on his head like a crown. It was a perfect fit. As he marched around with the skull on his head, people dropped shovels and sandbags, folding in half with laughter. No one thought to tell him to stop. No one was disgusted. Me included.
The private wore the skull for the rest of the day and night. Even on a mission, he put his helmet over the skull. He observed that he was grateful his hair had just been cut—since it would make it easier to pick out the pieces of rotting flesh that were digging into his head.
Wow, this just keeps getting better. This story assumes several things. First, that a mass grave wasn’t reported by anyone in this soldier’s chain of command. I would think that would be a significant find - not something they would hush up. After all, this was a Saddam-era grave, right? Why would soldiers keep that quiet?
Next, I also can’t believe that no one wouldn’t have come up and slapped that fool for prancing around with a piece of skull on his head — and wearing it for two days. I can’t believe his NCO would have let him get away with it. Finally, helmets aren’t the most comfortable things to wear anyway. It really borders on unbelief that someone would stick a piece of bone between his head and that helmet for that period of time.
So, we now come to the $64,000 question - is the New Republic pulling a fast one, or do they really believe this story? If they know this story is fake, and they are publishing it anyway, then they are the worst form of human garbage I can imagine — and I will question their patriotism. If, however, they really believe this story, then I question their ability to vet their own guest writers.
I’m looking forward to seeing how this plays out. The left has merrily supported war fakers in the past, willing to believe anything that puts our soldiers in a bad light. Their disdain for our president, the military, and this war leads them to believe anything that fits their world view.
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This is a “Winter soldier” Redux. John Kerry did this during Vietnam and here we go again. He got away with it, so why not try it again.
The left needs to believe that you are all stupid and evil. They hate that the word hero is attached to you. The despise noble behavior. They will do anything to destroy that image. This time, the ’silent majority’ is not silent and is reacting to these types of slanders and slurs.
This ’scott thomas’ is so far over the edge of lunacy that I can not believe anything he says - it flys in the face of logic. But, most of the lefties do.
Early in the war, we wrote to a young Marine who was working with the forensic scientists at mass graves. He wrote to us about how they were handled and the respect that was shown and the necessity to preserve and gently excavate.
The ‘chow hall’ story makes me want to slap ’scott thomas’ for being an insensitive piece of crap.
Have you checked out Goldfarb’s latest on this supposed soldier?
Looking more and more like fiction
“What we do know, according to the responses we’ve gotten so far, is that the badly burned woman described by Thomas does not seem to have served at FOB Falcon in the last 14 months“