This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Author: Sporkmaster

  • UPDATED: A reply from the Rag Blog.

    A few days ago I asked for your experiences from the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War. Many of you responded about your personal experiences in response to the accusations that these never happened. A few days ago the main editor responded in the article.

    I was heavily involved in the movement against the War in Vietnam from its earliest days through its duration — working primarily in Texas, but also in Northern California and New York. I helped organize and attended dozens of demonstrations and public events, including major national actions like the massive March on the Pentagon.

    I rarely saw GIs in any way disrespected and never saw a single instance of physical abuse. It was a highly-charged time and certainly there were some idiots out there, but to suggest that there was widespread disrespect towards GIs from within the peace movement is patently absurd.

    The Vietnam War became extremely unpopular among the general populace and also within the military itself. There was major opposition — and active resistance — among soldiers in Vietnam.

    GIs and returning vets were at the heart of the peace movement and we considered GIs — who were overwhelmingly draftees and many of whom were our childhood friends — to be our brothers and sisters, and to be victims of the system. They were certainly not the enemy.

    This is a terribly destructive myth and a disgraceful — and highly political — reinvention of history.

    How in the world do you expect us to believe that returning veterans were welcomed by the anti-war groups when people in the current anti-war generations have made it vary vocal to the contrary? Or do you mean the veterans that say want you want them to say?

    But the main point is that how can you say that the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War was a friend to US Veterans when the the current one has been anything but?


    Update:     More comments are coming in.

    In the 47 years I have been back from that war, I have yet to find a veteran who can speak first-hand about being spat on or any of the other right wing lies about how the antiwar movement treated veterans. I am sure “Masterspork,” who probably never got closer to combat (assuming he actually ever served) than the “warehouse wars” in Cam Ranh Bay over how many cartons of cigarettes were going to be “lost” for later sale on the black market, can’t tell any first-hand accounts either.

    Yea, because I never deployed for 14 months and went on over at least 164 missions in that time.

    No one can account for every hippie walking through an airport. But it was the consistent policy of every antiwar group to reach out to soldiers. Why else did we found the Oleo Strutt and a dozen other GI coffee houses?

    Yea like Under the Hood? The place where several people used as a place to meet before and after trying to stop the #rd ACR from deploying?Telling them they were going to “Die like Shit”?

    But the best one of all.

    As a Vietnam War veteran who volunteered and served honorably, I feel I was very naive when I volunteered, but slowly realized that I had been lied to and duped. When I returned I was never accosted or abused by anyone, especially not the students at the University of Texas, or while I traveled; and I never observed this happening to any Vietnam Vet. As to those who say they did, well I just do not believe it. The book mentioned above (The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam, New York University Press, 1998) researched and documented the news reports and magazines of the time and never found a report of spitting or calling “Baby Killer.” That line by Unknown (Jul 21, 2012) above, “They shouted “baby killer” and spit on me” is right out of the movie “Rambo: First Blood in 1982 ” where Sylvester Stallone delivers a monologue saying, “”It wasn’t my war. You asked me, I didn’t ask you and I did what I had to do to win, but somebody wouldn’t let us win. And I come back to the world and I see maggots at the airport, protesting me, spitting, calling me baby-killer and all kinds of vile crap!” ” The only true part of that is the, “It wasn’t my war.”

    UPDATE x2

    Your statements are absolutely false. There were many of the lying, so called “Swift Boaters for Truth [sic]” and others who made the statements you did. For this reason VVAW had a strict rule that when we participated in protests we were to always carry our DD214s to prove our service in Vietnam. To this day I still carry a copy of my DD214 and my orders to report to the 5th Special Forces Group when I protest another war. When the liars, Scott Swett, Jerome Corsi, Larry Bailey, and B. G. Burkett, made those claims to me at the 5th Triennial Vietnam Symposium at The Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, I pulled out my DD214 Burkett waved me off and said, “That doesn’t mean anything, those can be changed.” You can view and hear the SwiftBoat Liars talks here. Note at 1:12:44 Larry Bailey’s response to me when he asked for questions:

    Then you can watch the VVAW responses here:

    As to your claim, “Anti-War groups were very violent and intolerant of anyone in a military hair cut” you are painting all those who protested the Vietnam mess with the same brush. There were those who, after years of protest, became angry and may have been violent. However, most of it was overblown. And the SwiftBoat Liars tried to say that VVAW and John Kerry were violent, yet the very FBI records that the SwiftBoaters refer to stated very clearly: “The delegations from New England and the East Coast proposed activities a week before Christmas and advocated non-violent civil disobedience.” The VVAW New England and the East Coast were Kerry’s delegations to the VVAW Steering Committee, yet the SwiftBoating Liars used the violent claim against Kerry in the 2004 election, all LIES!

    It was the Texas VVAW who helped the GIs in the Oleo Strut Coffee House in Killeen. We were not “intolerant of anyone in a military hair cut,” we were there to help and support them. If you felt that way, I suspect it was your own projection that made you feel that way, because it did not come from the VVAW.

    Peace, Terry J. DuBose, 1st Lt. US Regular Army, Airborne, Vietnam 1967-68; Texas VVAW State Coordinator & National Steering Committee, 1970-1972.

  • Aviation on the brain.

    Since we are talking about childhood hobbies that I figure I weigh in. Feel free to skip this one unless you are really interested in aviation.

    More specifically propeller aircraft. I like to think that I know a few things about military aviation and then I find something new. One of the main aircraft that I caught my attention is the Avia S-199.. This aircraft got my attention because it is a Me-109 version that was used by Israeli Air Force the First Squadron. Did a little reading on it and found out a few facts about the aircraft that I did not know. Like the fact that they used the engine of the He-111 bomber. One would think that having a bomber engine would have improved performance similar to the F4u Corsair. Well not so much.

    The resulting combination of parts was an aircraft with extremely poor handling qualities. The substitute engine with the propeller lacked the responsiveness of the Daimler-Benz unit and the torque created by the massive paddle-bladed propeller made control very difficult. This, in combination with the 109’s narrow-track undercarriage, made landings and take-offs extremely hazardous.

    The Daimler-Benz DB 605 engine allowed for a central cannon mount (Motorkanone in German) that fired through the propeller spinner. This was not possible with the Junkers Jumo 211, and so the S-199 used a version of the Luftwaffe’s Rüstsatz VI modification kit, which consisted of a pair of MG 151 cannon, one each in a gun pod, one beneath each wing. This further impinged on the aircraft’s performance. A final hidden danger lay in the gun synchronizer for the cowl-mounted MG 131 machine guns, which did not work as it was meant to, leading a few Israeli aircraft to shoot off their own propellers.

    But the interesting part is that the Avia S-199 was used in combat against Egypt Spitfires. So we have Jewish pilots using German aircraft against British Spitfires which is the Icon of the Battle of Britain. Strange huh?

    Oh it gets better. This one is about the F4U Corsair and theP-51 Mustang . One of the biggest things that has been debated about which fighter is better considering their history in World War Two, Korea and onward. Well it seemed like the two did go head to head against each other in what is known as the Football War. In this case it looks like the F4U Corsair came out on top in 1969, twenty five years after the last dogfights of WW2 there were still dogfights with proper aircraft? Strange indeed.

  • Basic Training to leave the Army?

    It seems that there is a idea that is going to be used to help Veterans leave the Military. Just in the same way that one has to go through Basic Training to enter service, there would be a Basic Training for preparation to leave the Military.

    Troops leaving the military will go through a five- to seven-day reverse boot camp covering job skills, personal finances and veterans benefits under a new initiative to be announced by President Barack Obama on Monday.

    At a speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Nevada, Obama will outline the program — dubbed Transition Goals Planning Success, or Transition GPS — as part of a wider effort to help curb veterans unemployment and the difficult integration into civilian life for many troops.

    The overhaul is the first significant change in the military’s Transition Assistance Program in more than 20 years. It comes in response to criticism that the current three-day voluntary program is outdated and too superficial.

    At face value it seems like it would be something that would work. But we shall see if it works.

  • Asking for your experences with the the anti-war groups during the Vietnam War.

    I recently read one of the blogs that I avoid for this reason. This time the Rag Blog is writing about the insults and saliva that the Troops faced when they came back home. In this post they claim that it was all just a myth that never happened. That all of it was done by the media to discredit the anti-war movement.

    In addition the government and its “partners” will be distributing educational materials about the war, according to the Pentagon, but it is unlikely that the Vietnamese side of the story or that of the multitude of war resisters in the U.S., civilian and military, will receive favorable attention. Many facts, including the origins of the war will undoubtedly be changed to conform to the commemoration’s main goal of minimizing Washington’s defeat and maximizing the heroism and loyalty of the troops.

    Granted this is nothing new but this is the sentence that made me post about this.

    Thanks for this. It’s always amazed me that people would claim returning Viet Nam vets were badly-treated in the U.S. Hell, these guys were our friends; we all knew people who went over because they personally saw no alternative. We were on their side and we welcomed them home.

    Know who’s been making this shit up? The guys who backed the war but evaded service –– and who do nothing for veterans even now: the chickenhawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld and the AWOL Bush

    So if you have a experience with the anti-war movement feel free to head on over there and tell them your story.

  • Millard plays the expert on war again.

    Well looks like our good buddy Geoff “Stolen Valor” Millard is being used as a expert voice into war. It seems that he is the main source about Iraq in the article called War Is Betrayal Persistent Myths of Combat.

    He relates the story of a traffic-control mission gone awry when an eighteen-year-old soldier made a bad decision. He was sitting atop an armored Humvee monitoring a checkpoint. An Iraqi car approached, and the soldier, fearing it might be carrying a suicide bomber, pressed the butterfly trigger on his .50 caliber machine gun. He put two hundred rounds into the car in less than a minute, killing a mother, a father, a four-year-old boy, and a three-year-old girl.

    “They briefed this to the general,” Millard says. “They briefed it gruesome. I mean, they had pictures. And this colonel turns around to this full division staff and says: ‘If these fucking Hadjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn’t happen.’

    Yea mean while every person who has have used or familiar with the M2 and the rate of fire knows the errors in this, the author gets sucked into it.

    Those who return to speak this truth, like Goodell or Millard, are our contemporary prophets. They struggle, in a culture awash in lies, to tell what few have the fortitude to digest. The words these prophets speak are painful.

    Also considering that a case where a entire car being shot up would be in EVERY media outlet known to man that you think that it could be covered up? But it has more claims like this by him.

    The briefing that Millard and his superiors received after the checkpoint killing was one of many. Sergeant Perry Jeffries, who served in the Fourth Infantry Division in Iraq after being called out of retirement, said the killing of Iraqi civilians at checkpoints was routine.

    “Alpha troop and Balad Ruz shot somebody at least once,” he says, referring to a troop detachment and to the soldiers manning a checkpoint in a small Diyala Province village. “Somebody else on what we called the Burning Oil Checkpoint, they shot somebody with a .50 cal, shot a guy once, and then several times.”

    Killing becomes a job. You do it. Sometimes it unnerves you. But the demons usually don’t hit until you come home, when you are lying alone in bed and you don’t dare to tell your wife or your girlfriend what you have become, what you saw, what you did, why you are drinking yourself into a stupor, why you so desperately want to forget your dreams.

    But of course he is the good guy in all of this.

    Millard’s thirteen months in Iraq turned him into a passionate antiwar activist. He is the cofounder of the Washington, D.C., chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War and served as its president for three years. He has taken part in numerous antiwar demonstrations around the country, was one of the organizers of the Winter Soldier hearings, returned to Iraq on a humanitarian aid mission in 2011, and now directs a homeless veterans initiative.

    But the best line is this one.

    If veterans speak of terrible wounds, of lies told to make them kill, of evil committed in our name, we fill our ears with wax.

    Yea no. There were some other names that I did not recall were Jessica Goodell. Anyone else know who she is?

    Jessica Goodell came to understand that torment only too well, as she relates in her 2011 memoir Shade it Black: Death and After in Iraq. Goodell wasn’t poor. She grew up in a middle-class home near Chautauqua Lake in upstate New York. Her father was a lawyer, and her mother worked at home. But her “universe fractured” when she was sixteen and her parents divorced. She could barely continue “the motions of everyday existence.” She was accepted at Ithaca College her senior year, but just before graduation a uniformed Marine came to her high school. He told her he had come to find “tough men.”

  • The drama that is Afghanistan.

    Well it seems that the drama in Afghanistan is alive and well. The first part which is a recent attack that caused the death of fourteen civilians by theTaliban IED.

    At least 14 people, including women and children, were killed in southern Afghanistan’s Kandahar province on Sunday when the two vehicles they were riding in struck roadside bombs, police said.

    The victims were riding in a tractor and truck when the bombs went off in Arghistan district Sunday morning, said Kandahar Police Chief Gen. Abdul Raziq. The blasts wounded three others, he said.

    No one immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

    Considering that the majority of forces that are fighting against NATO and Afghan forces used IEDs it is a safe assumption who planted the bomb. Also the same kind of weapon that recently killed at least six US Service members today.

    This however is not deterring a unknown list of private citizens from the United States and Japan from donating at least sixteen billion in foreign aid. Considering the events of the past few years in Afghanistan the group has demanded that the funds come with several obligations and requirements.

    The agreement, called the Tokyo Framework of Mutual Accountability, says that foreign governments will assure Afghanistan a steady stream of financing in exchange for stronger anticorruption measures and the establishment of the rule of law. Up to 20 percent of the money would depend on the government meeting governance standards, according to the document, which was released here on Sunday.

    However the United Nations Chief as publicly stated that the group should withdraw the requirements being made by this private group and not hold the funds “hostage”.

    “We must be fully conscious that Afghan institutions are still in their nascent stages,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told representatives of more than 80 nations and organizations attending an aid conference in Tokyo.

    “The very programs which offer the best hope of sustainability of Afghan institutions should not be held hostage to complex preconditions.”

    Well considering that the Taliban has publicly made a video of a twenty two year old woman being executed might have the donors unsure about the UN’s ability to protect and enforce any of it’s programs. Even some of ours.

  • The 90s Army and you.

    Well I found a article by Jessica Scott that takes a look at the US Army of the 90s and today. Because I joined in 2006, I was wondering if I could get a idea of how on the mark this is. Lets start with this.

    So now all we’re hearing about is the return to the 90s army. When shiny boots, a pressed uniform and a good PT score meant you were a great leader. We’re already seeing outstanding leaders punished for their less than stellar PT scores. Got an injury? Too bad, you’re slacking so you’re not the total army soldier we need.

    I know that I have seen some this happen now but this is the part that I wanted to ask about.

    Lest we need a history lesson, let’s not forget about the exodus from the force in 03-04, when a ridiculous amount of company grade officers fled in the face of the possibility of a long war. When far too many folks who had reached their 20 years of duty dropped their paperwork to avoid the conflict.

    We talk about how the SGTs and SSGs in our Army today don’t know how to lead soldiers. Who’s fault is that? Instead of pointing the finger at the force, let’s look at the 90s army that abandoned the OIF-OEF army to fight the long war. The leaders of the OIF-OEF army were flexible enough to sustain combat over nearly a decade against an unconventional force. We were not flawless, not by any means. We made mistakes and some Really Bad Shit happened on our watch.

    But to tell a force that has sacrificed through more than a decade at war that the 90s army was somehow better than us? That the 90s Army was more professional because we looked like soldiers then? The shiny boots didn’t stick around long enough to get dust on them in the deserts of Iraq. Too many of those pressed uniforms damn sure didn’t bleed in combat.

    So what do you say? How accurate is this in regards to a mass exodus to avoid deployment? Or for the view that the Army in the 90s was better remembered then it really was?

  • Westboro threatens service for fallen Marine.

    This is not 100 percent confirmed but it looks like Westbro is threatening to disrupt the memorial service of Lance Cpl. Joshua Witsman. If anyone is near the Covington Illinois that want to be ready to provide interference to help protect the dignity and sanctity for the Witsman’s family would be appreciated.

    COVINGTON, Ind. — A 23-year-old Marine from western Indiana has been killed during military action in Afghanistan, family friends said.

    Flags are flying at half-staff outside the Fountain County Courthouse in honor of Lance Cpl. Joshua Witsman in his hometown of Covington.

    Fountain County Clerk Patty Gritten told WLFI-TV that she knew Witsman his entire life and that he had always wanted to serve his country.