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

Category: Military issues

  • Fallen Marine’s family adopt his dog

    It’s a well-known fact that we at TAH love dogs, so we’re especially happy when dogs get good homes;

    The parents of a U.S. Marine killed in Afghanistan are adopting the bomb-sniffing dog who the military says loyally rushed to their son’s side when he was fatally shot.

    Darrell and Kathy Rusk were expected to take home Eli on Thursday. The black Labrador is being retired from military service following the death of Pfc. Colton Rusk. The military says the 20-year-old Texan died in December during a gun battle with Taliban fighters.

    Thanks to Old Trooper for the link.

  • Democrats ask DoD to recharacterize discharges of DADT violators

    Sorry guys, but you knew at the time coming out of the closet would get you discharged. Too late now. From Stars & Stripes;

    A group of House Democrats want troops previously dismissed under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” law to be able to apply for honorable discharge status, opening the door for them to receive veterans benefits.

    In a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates last month, House Armed Services Committee ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., and two colleagues asked Pentagon officials to look into the possibility of allowing those troops to petition the boards of correction to upgrade their status to an honorable discharge, if they received a lesser distinction.

    There should be no Mulligans. They made their choices, for whatever reasons. Nothing could be more detrimental to good order and discipline. It’s like giving amnesty to draft dodgers.

  • Senate blames FBI and Pentagon for Hasan

    Associated Press reports that a Senate report blames the FBI and the Pentagon for the terrorist act committed by Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood a year and a half ago;

    A Senate report on the Fort Hood shooting is sharply critical of the FBI and its failure to adequately share information with the military about the alleged shooter’s extremist views.

    And it says the Pentagon has failed to make necessary changes to identify violent Islamic extremism as a danger so that commanders will more readily watch for it and discharge service members who express those views.

    But the report, which was being released Thursday, said the Defense Department did not inform or train commanders about how to recognize someone radicalized to Islamic extremism or how to distinguish that from the peaceful practice of Islam.

    Yeah, I blame the FBI for not telling the Army about Hasan’s associations with Islamic extremists, however, I’m pretty sure if the Army had tried to do something about Hasan, like booting him from the Army, some member of Congress would have been crawling up the Army’s ass with a microscope and charging them with being bigots or something.

    The problem is that the US government is afraid of calling a spade a spade and that translates into bad personnel management decisions. Yeah, it’s easy to point at the FBI in retrospect, but the problem is that the whole culture needs to change. People who have the potential to do evil must be named as such without the fingerpointers, whether it’s the FBI, the Army or the EPA, having their motives questioned.

    The US culture is such that treason and plotting to do harm with extremists isn’t considered criminal…or even suspect.

  • PTSD treatment sure has changed

    Just A Grunt sent us a link to an article about the kind of people who are getting hired these days to treat our soldiers’ PTSD.

    A therapist treating an army sergeant for post-traumatic stress disorder allegedly stalked and sexually harassed the soldier — apparently sending him lewd text messages and threatening his family — in a case that culminated with a high-speed chase and the therapist in a psychiatric hospital, according to a military investigation.

    Prosecutors Tuesday charged Rachelle Santiago, 43, an independent social worker hired to counsel soldiers at Fort Riley in Kansas, with stalking the sergeant who she was counseling for PTSD and marital problems.

    The story ends with an hour-long, 100-mile-an-hour high speed chase and the apprehended therapist in a state mental institution promising to see the soldier once she got out. Her lawyer blames steroids she was taking for a nasal problem.

    Yeah, I know most therapists aren’t like this one, but this bat-shit crazy bitch should have been detected long before she started parking in front of the sergeant’s home and threatening his family.

    You need to read the whole story to get the full effect.

  • Manning updates

    The Washington Post reports this morning that Bradley Manning, the soldier who released mountains of classified information to Wikileaks, was diagnosed as unfit for duty in Iraq by a mental health professional at Fort Drum, but that Manning’s command disregarded that diagnosis.

    The Army investigation, which is separate from an ongoing criminal inquiry, found that Manning’s immediate supervisors did not follow procedures for overseeing the secure area where the classified information was kept, greatly increasing the risk of a security breach, the official said.

    Yeah, that doesn’t excuse Manning’s treason either.

    Meanwhile, Amnesty International has busied itself with Manning’s treatment while he’s at Quantico’s confinement facility;

    On his website, [Manning’s lawyer David E.] Coombs says Manning is being kept in solitary confinement 23 hours a day, barred from having sheets or using a pillow, prohibited from keeping personal items in his cell, and forced to respond to a guard’s queries every five minutes. Manning cannot exercise while in his cell, and he must strip down to his underwear before going to bed. If guards can’t see him clearly when he’s sleeping, he is woken.

    And Amnesty International is trying to convince the Brits that Manning is a Brit, too. I wonder when was the last time AI checked in on Bowe Bergdahl, the paratrooper being held by the Taliban.

  • Bradley Minning is just like Martin Luther King, Jr.

    Dingus Kevin Zeese writes at the Huffington Post that Bradley Manning, the incarcerated traitor who unloaded his computer of classified informationonto the world, walks in the footprints of Martin Luther King, Jr. the civil rights leader who brought a dawn from our segregationist past. First Matthis and now Manning. Why are white people so quick to point how MLK they can be?

    Bradley Manning, a young man from Oklahoma, believed as many Americans do, that the U.S. is a force for good in the world. It was not until he was in Iraq and when he saw documents and videos crossing his computer screen that he realized America does not play the role he had been told.

    Bradley Manning had a fight with his boyfriend and somehow figured this would teach him. There’s nothing noble about what he did…he cost people their lives because he had a hissy fit. This is the height of idiocy. It doesn’t serve to elevate the image of Bradley Manning and drags MLK’s image through the mud. WTF is it with white liberals these days?

  • Chinese/Top Gun propaganda

    A reader sent us a link to a Foreign Policy blog entry that links a Chinese propaganda video to shots from the movie Top Gun. Apparently, the Chinese edited the video to look like their J-10 fighter could take on an F-5;

    In the newscast, the way a target was hit by the air-to-air missile fired by a J-10 fighter aircraft and exploded looks almost identical to a cinema scene from the Hollywood film Top Gun.

    A net user who went by the name “??” (Liu Yi) pointed out that the jet that the J-10 “hit” is an F-5, a US fighter jet. In Top Gun, what the leading actor Tom Cruise pilots an F-14 to bring down is exactly an F-5. Looking at the screenshots juxtaposition, one cannot fail to find that even flame, smoke and the way the splinters fly look the same.

    You can check out the screenshots at the link and decide for yourself.

  • The DADT repeal cluster

    The Associated Press reports that the Pentagon is gearing up for a plan to train straight folks to live and work with gays in the military;

    Details have been scarce as the military has scrambled to pull together the dozens of legal and policy changes that must be made by all the services in order to put the new law into effect.

    The changes affect how troops are recruited, trained and discharged, as well as how same sex partners will be treated in terms of various health and other benefits.

    Some will be easy to implement. For example, recruits will no longer be turned down because they are gay.

    But others involving benefits, housing and the execution of the training program will be more complex.

    Yeah, that doesn’t sound disruptive at all, does it? What with thousands of troops moving into and out of a combat zone at any given time, this sounds like it won’t affect readiness even a little bit. I thought gays were just like us and they only wanted to be treated like the rest of us. Then why all of this drama to “train” people to tolerate people who claim they’ve been among us the whole time?

    I remember when the Army started training us on race relations (back in the late 70s) and the only thing their training did was infuriate everyone involved and made matters worse. Especially since there was no real problem to begin with.