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

Category: Military issues

  • Army adjusts to operating in phony soldier environment

    1stCavRVN11B sent us this article about Jesse Bernard Johnston, the phony soldier we mentioned last week who used forged documents to join the Army as a sergeant. The Army has decided that they’ll use their own records rather than accept a DD214 discharge an enlistee hands them.

    The Army is instituting a new procedure for checking the backgrounds of enlistees who claim to have a military record after a report that a reservist apparently faked a background as a Marine to enter the service.

    Recruiters can no longer simply accept discharge papers as proof of service, Douglas Smith, public information officer for the Army recruiting command, told The Associated Press on Thursday. They now must also seek to verify the documents through a military database, he said.

    We’ve found falsified DD214s – most notably, Geoff Millard, the president of the board of IVAW who added three Meritorious Medals along with a load of other crap to his DD214. Of course, Jesse MacBeth and his forgery is the most famous (the fake, the real one).

    I’m surprised that the Army isn’t doing this already – but after watching the admin people ignore the usefullness of a computer network at Walter Reed, maybe I’m not all that surprised.

  • Soldier beaten, rifle stolen

    Just A Grunt sent us this story from Atlanta of a soldier on leave with his rifle (?!) who was mugged while sitting in his cousin’s car;

    Seven men walked to the car, he said

    “They were coming up to the car,” the soldier told the television station. “I noticed T.J. hit the unlock button. They came up to the side of the car. They opened the door and grabbed my rifle.”

    The soldier said he was punched, kicked and hit in the head with a glass bottle when he tried to retrieve his gun.

    “I tried to call out to my cousin T.J. but he didn’t do anything,” the soldier said in a WSB news report.

    The story doesn’t mention why doofus was home on leave, where his unit is, or how the Hell he took his weapon on leave. And if it’s even possible to take weapon on leave, what was he doing sitting in a bad neighborhood with the damn thing?

    Sounds to me like a whole bunch of people are going to jail over this one, if it’s even true.

    So, how’s it make all our friends in Atlanta feel knowing there’s some version of an assault weapon on your streets?

  • The “Blumenthal Law”

    Doug Sterner sent us this link from the Deseret News last night about orin hatch’s proposed bill that would add an amendment to the so-called Stolen Valor Law which would make it illegal to claim that an individual served in the armed services in combat.

    The Stolen Valor Act makes it illegal to falsely wear military decorations and medals. In proposing his amendment, Hatch said, “It is a crime to dishonor the sacrifice of so many by falsely representing combat service for the purposes of self-promotion or benefit. My amendment would deter those who would falsely prop themselves up in order to appear worthy of the award and title of ‘combat veteran.’

    Of course, the solution to Congress is always more legislation – when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I happen to agree with Mr. Sterner in this instance – we don’t need a law to make speech criminal, we need to build a national database. The availability of information coupled with the access that already exists would put an end to all of the phonies.

    A braggart in a bar would have his lies capped when his military record can be checked on the spot from a cell phone. people like Blumenthal would think twice if their service records were available while he was giving his campaign speech. Military.com used to have such a database in rudimentary form but they’ve let it deteriorate over the past year or so.

    All that isneeded is the money from Congress, and we can avoid all of the legal wrangling that a bill to curb 1st Amendment speech would cause.

    Mr Sterner tells me he’s back before Congress with HR 666 (you can see the bill at the search function here) a bill which would require the services and the Department of Homeland Security, the Transportation Department, and the merchant marines to establish a database;

    `(c) Public Availability- The Military Valor Roll of Honor shall be a searchable database and available for public inspection.’.

    It might stem the recent spate of phonies.

  • Webb to vote ‘no’ on DADT compromise

    Apparently Senator James Webb has decided to vote against the Congressioanl compromise bill to overturn the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy currently keeping gay military members in the closet. He reasons;

    The White House and Secretary Gates both said today that, ideally, the Defense Department should complete this review before legislative action is taken. There is no question that a review of the policy is necessary and important. I see no reason for the political process to pre-empt it.”

    The White House and Congress have been shoving their POS bill around hoping that they can make it appear as if they’re actually doing something for their base besides posturing. Now Webb stands in their way to pass anything they can use as a banner before the election.

    So I’m wondering what dicksmith will say. At Vets Voice, he’s been regularly beating up on Republicans who’ve spoken out against repealing DADT before the Pentagon has finished it’s study. I can only imagine how deafening is the silence in dicksmith’s dorm room right now since dicksmith has to change his Depends every time someone mentions Webb. Imagine – Webb agrees with Scott Brown.

  • Marine defends Kagan

    Robert Merrill, currently a captain serving in the Marine Corps, and former Harvard Law School student, has an opinion piece in the Washington Post entitled “A veteran’s Harvard ally: Elena Kagan” in which he weakly tries to convince us that Supreme Court nominee really does support the military and veterans despite the fact that she wouldn’t allow military recruiters the same support as other recruiters at Harvard Law School.

    Apparently, his proof of her support for the military is that she got free coffee for all of the students and took veterans to dinner once-a-year;

    She was charismatic and intimidating, and, most important, she gave students free coffee in the morning.

    Around the time that Kagan sent the first of several e-mails criticizing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” she hosted a Veterans Day dinner for the few student-veterans attending Harvard Law. That was the first time I met Kagan. There was no agenda for the dinner, as best as I could tell, other than to thank us for our service. I don’t believe “don’t ask, don’t tell” ever came up. Either because of her charm or the quality of the food, I became one of her admirers.

    Merrill goes on to explain that, from his students point of view, he didn’t notice that recruiters’ efforts weren’t hindered by Kagan’s policies. And why would she discuss “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with a couple of students who were no longer affected by the policy?

    Merrill makes the same mistake the most civilians make. They confuse the Left’s treatment of veterans with the way they treat the military. The Left treats veterans like they are victims, they treat active duty members of the military who are doing their jobs like they’re plague carriers.

    How many other student groups had annual dinners with Kagan on their respective “day”? Merrill doesn’t say, but he implies that because she paid for a dinner for a few veterans with department funds for a few years, she doesn’t deserve to be labeled anti-military.

    I don’t follow the logic. I can, however, name some of my professors who supported members of the military (since I attended college as both an active duty soldier and a veteran) who never bought me coffee or dinner.

    There’s more at Powerline.

  • Mojave Cross replaced

    The Washington Times reports that someone else sneaked up on the hill in the Mojave desert and replaced the cross that was stolen last week;

    A week after a cross was stolen from a Mojave Desert war memorial that played a key role in a recent Supreme Court decision, a different cross was discovered early Thursday morning at the same site.

    The National Park Service said in a press release Thursday afternoon that the replica cross would be removed.

    Late Thursday, Mojave National Preserve spokeswoman Linda Slater told reporters in California that the new cross is illegal and must come down.

    I’m getting dizzy.

  • Who are the CT vets who “hold off” condemnation of Blumenthal

    There’s an article in the CT New Times entitled “Area Vietnam Veterans Hold Off Condemnation of Blumenthal” about the revelation that Connecticut’s Attorney General had been lying about his service during the Vietnam War. The reporter mentions five veterans who don’t seem to care much about Blumenthal’s lying – a couple even cite the “everybody does it” excuse.

    One name jumped out at me – Paul Bucha. Now Bucha is an honest-to-goodness Medal of Honor recipient for his actions in Vietnam and I don’t mean to denigrate his service in the least, but Bucha said in the article;

    “I hope it isn’t true,” said Paul Bucha, of Ridgefield, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam. “He’s a decent guy. I’d like to believe in our better angels.”

    Bucha declined to speculate about what his opinion might be if Blumenthal were proved to be intentionally lying.

    “My reaction might be far more dramatic than other people,” he said, nothing that some of the men he commanded in Vietnam were killed there.

    But maybe the reporter should have mentioned that Paul Bucha is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who famously campaigned for President Obama.

    There are rumors going around that Bucha is the fellow who advised President Obama’s staff that they could skip the “Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball” for Medal of Honor recipients. Only rumors, mind you, I don’t mean to lend credence to rumors.

    There’s nothing wrong with Mr. Bucha supporting Obama, of course, but it seems to me that if the reporter wanted to give just a few examples of veterans’ opinions, he’d want us to know from whom those quotes are coming and who, exactly, was supporting Blumenthal’s duplicity.

    Knowing this about Mr. Bucha makes me doubt the intentions of the other four veterans in the article.

  • BP Coast Guard?

    I got a link off of FaceBook that makes a claim that the US Coast Guard is running interference for those that are trying to report on the BP spill and the oil that is being left on the Gulf. “This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours,”Except that there is more to the story.

    Because I was following this on my phone I could not watch the video and it had trouble going to a second link. So I was on the assumption that the reporters where trying to get too close to the original oil platform and the Coast Guard was preventing them from entering the area. But it seems that the Coast Guard was preventing the reports entry into a undetermined gulf coast location. Well maybe it was the Coast Guard.

    When CBS tried to film a beach with heavy oil on the shore in South Pass, Louisiana, a boat of BP contractors, and two Coast Guard officers, told them to turn around, or be arrested.

    “This is BP’s rules, it’s not ours,” someone aboard the boat said. Coast Guard officials told CBS that they’re looking into it.


    Watch CBS News Videos Online

    So the entire story that claims that the that the US Coast Guard is trying run interference for BP is based on the claim that two people on the boat were USCG Officers. Yep that’s it. We also know that people never lie about military or government service.

    But that is not stopping people from accepting that as gospel.

    This is wrong in so many ways I hardly know where to start. What happened to laws about free access to navigable waters? Since when does BP get to arbitrarily impose LAW on free U.S. citizens? Why are the Coast Guard, a branch of our Armed Forces taking orders from a FOREIGN company?

    Also considering that BP made public a video of the underground oil pipe break almost a full week before this story came out. What did people think BP was trying to hide. I mean really.