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

Category: Military issues

  • Marine gets Silver Star 43 years after battle

    A really good story from the LA Times about a band of brothers who came together to get the recognition that one one of them deserved;

    [Marine Pfc. Daniel] Hernandez was 20 when he served as a machine gunner with M Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division. The company, which was among the hardest hit during the Vietnam War, lost 17 men on March 5, 1966, during Operation Utah in Quang Ngai province.

    That day…Hernandez dived through enemy fire to pick up a wounded Marine and carry him to safety. A bullet grazed his back. Still, he refused to be evacuated, and, moments later, when he saw an enemy soldier firing at a group of wounded Marines, he ran through oncoming bullets to kill the soldier and save his comrades. Another bullet later grazed his head, sending him to a hospital in Guam.

    But the real story is how a former lieutenant discovered one of his troops had never got the recognition he’d deserved and spent three years rectifying the deficiency.

    Lupori, who was Hernandez’s commander during the battle, recommended the young man for the medal. Lupori was soon transferred to another battalion and lost contact with Hernandez, but he always assumed that Hernandez had been awarded the honor.

    Forty years later, Lupori found out that wasn’t the case.

    By chance in 2005, another Marine brought the two men together for lunch. When Lupori congratulated Hernandez on the medal, Hernandez didn’t know anything about it.

    “It was then I decided to do everything in my power to get him his medal,” said Lupori, who believes the paperwork was lost in the military bureaucracy.

    What does a real hero say about his medal?

    He dedicated the honor to all Marines and soldiers and the youths at Hollenbeck.

    “In my company,” he said. “I did not own valor. It was not exclusive to me. My company owned valor.”

  • Trouble with your VA Ed benefit check?

    TSO just got an email that some of you veteran students who got your stop-gap education benefit check might be having trouble cashing the damn things. The VA says you can cash them problem free at US Bank and Bank of America without them holding your money until funds are made available.

  • Our changing times

    US Obama Afghanistan

    This morning we awaken to the Washington Post’s Bruce Ackerman pronouncing that “Generals Shouldn’t Disagree in Public With the Commander in Chief“. Ackerman writes;

    As commanding general in Afghanistan, McChrystal has no business making such public pronouncements. Under law, he doesn’t have the right to attend the National Security Council as it decides our strategy. To the contrary, the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 explicitly names the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the National Security Council’s exclusive military adviser. If the president wanted McChrystal’s advice, he was perfectly free to ask him to accompany Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, when the council held its first meeting on Afghanistan this week.

    That’s a little bit different than the article the Post ran in December 2006 when they proudly announced that “White House, Joint Chiefs At Odds on Adding Troops” – no warning that generals shouldn’t publicly disagree with the president when the president is Bush.

    A senior administration official said it is “too simplistic” to say the surge question has broken down into a fight between the White House and the Pentagon, but the official acknowledged that the military has questioned the option. “Of course, military leadership is going to be focused on the mission — what you’re trying to accomplish, the ramifications it would have on broader issues in terms of manpower and strength and all that,” the official said.

    Leftist blogs have demanded McChrystal resign –

    General McChrystal’s breach has been bad enough to deserve peremptory dismissal

    And that’s what I think he should get — though I haven’t seen much protest or even much awareness of his breach of protocol.

    Others are predicting catastrophe;

    Indeed, we are already seeing the damage that can be done when even a sliver of daylight appears between the views of the President and his military commander.

    So in these changing times, Generals should now shut up and not advocate for the successful completion of their mission when just a scant few years ago they were celebrated as media stars when they publicly disagreed with the president. I wonder why things have changed.

  • What war? Where?

    This week our president has set as few minutes to talk to his National Security staff to discuss the war in Afghanistan. Ain’t that nice of him? Last week General Stanley McCrystal, the commander of our forces in Afghanistan, told a reporter that he’d only spoken directly to the President once since June. Perhaps, if they’d spoken more often, Obama might have had a plan ready when McCrystal asked for more resources.

    Since McCrystal asked for more troops, 43 more have been killed in Afghanistan while the Obama Administration diddles, according to Good Lt. at The Jawa Report.

    In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove reminds us that George Bush faced similar circumstances in regards to Iraq;

    Mr. Obama’s predecessor faced a similar situation: a war that was grinding on, pressure to withdraw troops, and conflicting advice—including from some who saw the war as unwinnable. But George W. Bush talked to generals on the ground every week or two, which gave him a window into what was happening and insights into how his commanders thought. That helped him judge their recommendations on strategy.

    The difference of course is that Bush actually cared about the troops he sent in harm’s way. That doesn’t seem to be a factor in the Obama Administration;

    Mr. Obama’s aloofness on the war will be a problem if the recent airing of Joe Biden’s views on Afghanistan is a tipoff that Mr. Obama will rely on his vice president’s guidance. According to reports in the New York Times and other publications, Mr. Biden supports reducing troop levels in favor of surgical attacks—mostly launched from offshore—and missile strikes against al Qaeda, especially in Pakistan.

    Like I wrote yesterday, Biden and Obama prefer the Clintonian approach to warfare – make a lot of explosions so that people think they’re actually doing something and depend on under-resourced ninjas to do the close-up work – but only if they can get out of the situation without a scratch.

    Biden and Obama, like Clinton think technology can get them out of a jam. Clinton used cruise missiles while Biden puts his eggs in the drone basket. Every weapon has it’s place and none is a silver bullet solution. But you can’t tell the two smartest men on the planet.

  • What really happened on that VA call

    Yesterday, I was on a conference call with TSO – well, actually it was just me and him – and I mentioned to him that it had been raining entirely too much in the DC area this weekend. I barely got off the phone when the rain finally stopped – and it hasn’t rained since that moment. So I’d like to thank TSO for ending the rainy spell we had this weekend.

    VoteVet’s dicksmith had the same experience that I had a few days earlier. He was on a conference call will Tammy Duckworth and Lynn Nelson from the Department of Veterans Affairs and they were talking about the new GI Bill. At VoteVets, Dicksmith writes that all he had to do was mention to Duckworth and Nelson that he wasn’t getting his benefit – and Viola! they decided to pay everyone. Dicksmith swoons;

    Honestly, I don’t think anyone on that call or in the Vet community in general expected this. I know I didn’t. The VA has shown what can be done when the agency actually cares what happens to the Veterans it serves.

    Yeah, why should we expect the DVA to suddenly begin doing what they should have been prepared to do two months ago seein’s how they’ve had a year to get ready for the deluge of paperwork and claims? Um, Dicksmith, if the VA, Tammy Duckworth and Black Beret Guy REALLY cared, you wouldn’t have had a conference call Friday. You’d have your check in your grubby little paw in the line at the bank.

    And, Army Sergeant, I’m not letting you off the hook, either – you swooned, too and forgave Shinseki all of his sins. For what? For doing his job – once?

    First of all, this remedy is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. To get your partial payment of your GI Bill benefits which you earned and filed for months ago, you have to go to one of 57 Regional Offices.

    I went to SUNY Oswego – my regional office was Buffalo. A four hour drive each way. But not to worry, the same VA who couldn’t get your benefit to you on time will send representatives to your school to arrange transportation to the regional office. How dependable will that be?

    I can schedule buses, for Pete’s sake – the veterans don’t need an eight hour bus ride (how many buses will be late, and how many veterans will ride for hours to find out their paperwork is screwed up, how many buses will break down?) they need their money that the government has been promising since before the last election!

    I guess some people are more pleased with the party to which an appointee belongs than they are the actual service they get from that appointee’s agency.

  • Kerry prepares for cut and run in Afghanistan

    Probably the last person I’d ever ask about military issues, John Kerry (lied, while better men died), has a blueprint for cut and run in Afghanistan in this morning’s Wall Street Journal entitled “Testing Afghanistan Assumptions“. Of course, as is his MO, be compares Afghanistan to Vietnam. Except Afghanistan isn’t anything like Vietnam, except in the mind of John Kerry who wants to remind us that he spent three months in Vietnam once.

    [O]ne of the lessons from Vietnam—applied in the first Gulf War and sadly forgotten for too long in Iraq—is that we should not commit troops to the battlefield without a clear understanding of what we expect them to accomplish, how long it will take, and how we maintain the consent of the American people. Otherwise, we risk bringing our troops home from a mission unachieved or poorly conceived. Gen. McChrystal offers no timetable or exit strategy, beyond warning that the next 12 months are critical. I agree that time is running out and that troops are dying without a sustainable strategy for victory. But we cannot rush to judgment.

    Timetabled withdrawals seem to be the Left’s way of saying that they don’t understand “exit strategies”. You think they would have learned their lesson when, in 1995, then-President promised the American people that we’d be out of Bosnia by October 1996. of course, we still have troops in Bosnia. The Democrats don’t understand victory – they seem to think that by just announcing an end date, all parties will comply. Kerry is no different. Kerry doesn’t bother in his missive to examine what would happen if we did withdraw. He’d rather pontificate about the judicious use of force – ignoring the indisputable fact that war and victory are necessary regardless of the cost. Navel-gazing in Congress will only result in more needless deaths among US forces while Kerry and his useless pals try to appear as if they know something about war and strategy;

    Mr. Obama promises not to send more troops to Afghanistan until he has absolute clarity on what the strategy will be. He is right to take the time he needs to define the mission. We should all follow his lead and debate all of the options. It may be that Gen. McChrystal has provided the road map to victory. Or it may be that some other strategy would work better, with fewer risks. We can’t know until we test every assumption and examine every option.

    In other words, Kerry, Congress and Obama is more than willing to let more US soldiers die while they campaign for the 2010 elections and stroke their anti-war base. This is what we get when Democrats have both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue – 535 armchair generals.

  • The torture report

    Like a dog with a bone, the ACLU thinks they have a winning hand with their FOIA releases from the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency. Along with their “partners”, Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace, they’ve been scratching through the documentation hoping that they’ll find a smoking gun that they can actually call torture.

    At Huffington Post, Jameel Jaffer, one of ACLU’s litigators, announced their new project “The Torture Report“.

    The goal is simple: to tell the whole story and to get it right. How to do this – how to bring together everything we know from tens of thousands of formerly secret documents, from official and independent investigations, from press reports and the many good books that have recently appeared, and from the growing number of first-hand accounts of those who witnessed, participated in, or suffered mistreatment, how to register it all so we can come to some conclusions – is a daunting challenge.

    At HuffPo, Jaffer names his stellar staff of writers;

    It will be a collaborative project. We have invited a group of expert contributors to offer comments and observations as new material appears. These contributors include Matthew Alexander, David Frakt, Glenn Greenwald, Joanne Mariner, Deborah Popowski, John Sifton, and Marcy Wheeler, as well as attorneys from the ACLU

    I inserted links to their bios – all except one. Mathew Alexander’s bio has yet to be written. I wrote about him a bit when he poked his head up at VoteVets last month. I didn’t know his real name then, but, as regular readers know, you can’t hide from the staff of This Ain’t Hell.

    Kit Bond has pulled out of the Congressional investigation of interogators’ techniques because he claims that Congress will hamstring future intelligence operations like they did in the 70s (Washington Times link);

    Sen. Christopher S. Bond, the panel’s vice chairman, said Mr. Holders decision to ignore President Obamas pledge to look forward – not back – has hampered the panels effort.

    The Department of Justice “sent a loud and clear message that previous decisions to decline prosecution mean nothing and old criminal charges can be brought anytime against anyone – against these odds, what current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the committee’s questions?” the Missouri Republican said.

    His Democrat co-chair on the Commission, Dianne Feinstein says she’ll continue on without Bond. So it ought to be a real effective report like the 9-11 Commission’s report. I guess all of that talk about change and hope was just blather. Hope and Change are words that relate to the future not about dwelling in the past. So, we here at This Ain’t Hell are all about the future – anything we can do to short circuit ACLU’s Torture Report we’ll do.

    There are a lot of hints that the right reader can pick up on in this post. Those of you who don’t get it, stay tuned for the ensuing episodes.

  • Last word on Drudge video link

    I think we can all agree that it wasn’t the US Military that snatched the protester off the street in Pittsburgh yesterday – even though Drudge says it was;

    drudge-military-snatch