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

Category: Media

  • Time reprints my criticism

    Some of you may remember the review I did last week on Time magazine’s cover story about the widening gap between the military and the protected classes of our society. Well, Harriet Barovick, one of the journalists over there acknowledge my criticism in this week’s edition of the magazine;

    ‘Yes, there is a divide ­between the warriors and the protected,’ Army veteran Jonn Lilyea wrote on the military blog This Ain’t Hell in response to Mark Thompson’s cover story “The Other 1%,” on the disconnect between civilians and the military. The retired platoon sergeant praised our story but criticized Time and other media outlets for contributing to the rift by focusing disproportionately on “anomalies” like the scandal at Abu Ghraib.

    I’d link to the quote, but I can’t find the damn thing, Harriet was good enough to email the text to me.

    I’m glad that Time recognized my criticism, but I’d be more glad if they’d change their editorial policy to print the good that the military accomplishes in the same way they’re so quick to print the bad.

    I repaid their attempt at good citizenship by buying a year’s subscription – but they may come to rue day. I started reading Time for the first time since college and there’s some real off-the-wall crap in there.

  • Armando Cordoba busted

    Back in September, we mentioned a Stolen Valor case that our buddy, JD at Professional Soldiers, was working on, in regards to Armando Cordoba (sounds like a cabana boy, doesn’t he?). Armando claimed in a local newspaper that he had been a POW of the North vietnamese Army.

    Average NCO sends us a link to that newspaper’s correction today;

    That information now appears to be inaccurate. Information obtained through a Freedom of Information Act Request through the National Archives show that Cordoba did serve honorably in Vietnam – earning a National Defense Service Medal, a Combat Infantryman Badge, a Vietnam Service Medal, a Vietnam Gallantry Cross w/Palm, a Vietnam Campaign Medal, 2 Overseas Bars and a Sharpshooter certification with the M14 Rifle.

    It shows no awarding of a Purple Heart, Bronze Star or Silver Star, or shows a designation as either an Army Special Forces Soldier (Green Beret) or a Prisoner of War.

    So how easy it is to get the information, journalists? Only it’s much more painless if you get the proof BEFORE you publish.

  • Time: An Army Apart

    That’s the cover of this week’s Time magazine. TIME’s Mark Thompson reports: “Never has the U.S. public been so separate, so removed, so isolated from the people it pays to protect it….. Most Americans have not served in uniform, no longer have a parent who did and are unlikely to encourage their children to enlist…. ” It really is a good article and if you remember how, you should buy the magazine. the article contains mountains of facts to support Thompson’s contention, if you need facts to tell you what you’ve seen with your own two eyes.

    Here’s a link to the article, but you need a subscription to read it all, that’s why I recommend the magazine. I don’t quite know what to make of it, The article seems to be a call to dismantle the military system we have now while at the same time it praises the umbrella of protection we currently enjoy.

    Me? Personally? I’m proud to have been a part of this new system since before the fall of Saigon and the job that we did rebuilding the military might of the United States from our experience in Vietnam and I wouldn’t change a thing. But yes there is a divide between the warriors and the protected. No where was it more evident to me on the streets of Silver Spring maryland one night when I was buying drinks for some veterans of the Battle of the Ranch House who were rehabbing at Walter Reed. Their scars were obvious, but didn’t insulate them from the civilian punks who tried, like young gunfighters, to make their names by taking down some real warriors. Like it’s a game.

    Thanking our troops for their service has become almost reflexive in the U.S., in part because of memories of Vietnam. Uniformed soldiers striding through airports are offered outstretched hands and words of gratitude; their tabs for sandwiches or beers are often picked up by strangers before the GIs have asked for the bill. But the sentiment reflects the problem: the public has scant idea of just how much the military has given since 9/11 beyond a vague sense that some 6,300 have died.

    Not even a little of the fault for the divide rests on the media who don’t hesitate to highlight the anomalies of Abu Ghraib, the “Kill team” and what they thought happened at Hadditha – that helps to alienate the public from the military.

    Then you have peckerwoods like Matthis “educating” public school students on things he’s never experienced. And the Jesse MacBeths who Eric May still thinks was telling the truth.

    Look at the Nidal Hasan shootings at Fort Hood – the media was quick to jump on the untrue story that Hasan was a veteran of deployments to Iraq and had snapped at the thought of another deployment. Until TAH put that lie to rest. Politicians in Arizona were quick to tie the shooter of a congresswoman to the military…another lie TAH revealed.

    It’s not the truth about the military that divides us from the general public, it’s the lies and the fantasies. And I’m pretty sure if Time takes an honest look at itself, they’ll find a bit of culpability for their own actions over the last ten years, too.

  • …and beer for my horses

    The Stolen valor posse mounted up and rode after another bad guy again last night and it was a beautiful thing to behold. The article was here until the posse, including our buddies Doug Sterner and Don Shipley started questioning the article and the several details that made it unbelievable – things like earning eight Purple Hearts in the last year of ground combat in Vietnam, a low draft lottery number for a sixteen-year-old, a Purple Heart awarded by Ronald Reagan.

    Needless to say Bob Duft was a phony, but the author of the article never checked with anyone before publishing the POS. I wish I’d had the foresight to screen shot it, but i did get the text of the article, so here it is for posterity;
    (more…)

  • To my face

    Thanks to Mr Wolf for sending a link to my interview with Columbia Journalism Review.

    Not all veterans are in agreement. Jonn Lilyeah blogged about Scott Olsen on his This Ain’t Hell page:

    Now, the hippies get to hide behind Olsen’s broken body and make a martyr of him…someone they would have spit on a few weeks ago and called a baby-killer. Scott, if you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

    Lilyea says he “feels bad that Olsen was injured,” but is ambivalent about who was responsible for his injury: “He was standing between people throwing rocks and the cops.” But the real issue is that Olsen is a member of Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veterans for Peace. “Those groups represent the opposite of what I believe in,” says Lilyea, “The focus of my blog is to try and give people a better view of what veterans are, rather than people like Scott Olsen.”

    What I really said was TAH is about calling peole idiots, because I don’t think they know they’re idiots, and I’m the only one doing it. I said that IVAW and VFP were only using Olsen’s bloody shirt to reise money. But apparently she didn’t want to say that outloud.

    I also asked where the concern was for Jose Guerena when Dupnik’s SWAT Association murdered the Marine Iraq veteran, Of course, she didn’t know what I was talking about nor did she look it up.

    Iguess I’ll never learn to that the media isn’t going to gt the story that no one else is doing, only the story that makes them feel good about themselves. I keep hoping that they’ll keep quoting what I say instead of what they want to hear.

    Not bad for a guy with just one eye, huh?

  • Write your obit before you die

    You don’t want the media to write your obituary, so you’d better do it now. I say that because of a link that CavRick sent us to a final report on Jim Forrester, a retired State Senator and legislature from North Carolina. He was a flight surgeon during the Vietnam War and then flew medical supplies to the far East. He was also the Adjutant General of the North Carolina AIr National Guard.

    So with all of those accomplishments under his belt, how does the Charlotte Observer start their last tribute?

    Jim Forrester, the Gaston County lawmaker who pushed hard to ban gay marriage for a good part of his 11 terms in the N.C. Senate, died Monday at age 74.

    Yup, his most significant act was opposing gay marriages. Yeah, they go on to tell about all of that other stuff, but the lead paragraph is how you introduce the subject to the readers.

    So everyone sit down right now and write your obit before the media highlights your high comment count at TAH.

  • FBI: Gang infiltration of the US military

    Old Trooper sends a link from the Washington Examiner in which they report that the FBI has issued a report which accuses the US military of harboring street gang members. TSO and I agree that this report has SPLC’s fingerprints all over it – like their wild goose chase for Neo Nazis in the military a few years back.

    “Gang infiltration of the military continues to pose a significant criminal threat, as members of at least 53 gangs have been identified on both domestic and international military installations,” the report says, resulting in American gang graffiti in Iraq, among other things.

    Now, i don’t see the benefit to gangmembers joining the military for nefarious reasons. yeah, you’ll learn the skill of hitting a man-sized target at 300+ meters with iron sights, but most gang wars don’t include those ranges. And i really don’t think gangsters have what it takes to stick out training for even eight weeks just to learn all of the non=warrior related stuff to make it that far. I’ve yet to see the Crios and Bloods conduct street D&C march-offs.

    So, in their report, the FBI says “well, maybe not all gang members who join the military are bad per se (or per say for the more illiterate among you, my dear readers)”;

    And gang member enlistment doesn’t require a sinister intention. “Many street gang members join the military to escape the gang lifestyle,” says the FBI, while others join at the behest of a court “as an alternative to incarceration.”

    So how many are we talking about here? How many are good gang members and how many are bad gang members? In fact how many gang members are in the military? The article doesn’t say…they just leave it up to the readers to paint the entire military with a broad brush.

  • Maryland court steals more valor

    In the case of Aron lawless, the Maryland former Marine who scammed Glock out of a free trip to Las Vegas meant for a real hero. Maryland’s federal Disrict Court ruled the Stolen Valor Act unconstitutional, on the grounds that the law was too broad. From the Journal-Star;

    The law was so broadly written, they said, that it would apply to an actor playing a role in a movie who claims to have received a military decoration.

    They argued it was unconstitutional, on its face and specifically as applied to Lawless.

    Yeah, the law has been around for six years and no one has filed charges against Clint Eastwood for his portrayal of Gunny Hiway, the Medal of Honor Marine in “Heartbreak Ridge”, nd I’ pretty sure that a federal prosecutor would find it hard to live with reputation of the guy who indicted Clint. Even if soeone did bring charges, is the Maryland courts saying that the justices couldn’t restrain themselves from allowing the case to go forward?

    In the journal-Star article, it says that Lawless did indeed deploy to iraq, however, a Baltimore Sun article that I linked to earlier this year reports that Lawless only served 35 days nthe Marines before getting booted.

    But i wouldn’t trust the Journal-Star article anyway. The author wrote;

    Lawless enlisted in the Army in March 2005 and was sent to Iraq as an infantryman and awarded an Infantry Badge and the Iraqi Freedom Campaign Ribbon. In July 2006, he returned to the United States to be treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for a pre-existing brain lesion.

    What’s an Infantry Badge? The SUn wrote that he was a Marine;

    Lawless did serve in the Marines, according to his military records — but only for 35 days. He was discharged in June 2003 for not disclosing an injury to his right knee before joining the corps, the affidavit said.

    So unless the Marines discharged him and then he enlisted in the Army, journalists have a lot of work to do to straighten out the details of this story before they start writing about it.

    Thanks to ROS for the link.