{"id":1482,"date":"2008-04-10T12:36:53","date_gmt":"2008-04-10T16:36:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=1482"},"modified":"2008-04-10T12:42:49","modified_gmt":"2008-04-10T16:42:49","slug":"martial-bling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=1482","title":{"rendered":"Martial bling"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I read this at The Sniper<\/a>, who got it from Curt at Flopping Aces<\/a> who had the guts to read the LA Times<\/a> in which some gumball named Mathew DeBord criticizes General Petreaus for wearing too many medals and badges.<\/p>\n

That’s a lot of martial bling, especially for an officer who hadn’t seen combat until five years ago. Unfortunately, brazen preening and “ribbon creep” among the Army’s modern-day upper crust have trumped the time-honored military virtues of humility, duty and personal reserve.<\/p>\n

Think about any of the generals you’ve seen in recent years — Norman Schwarzkopf, Barry McCaffrey, Wesley Clark (all now retired) and others — and the image you’ll conjure no doubt includes a chest full of shimmering decorations. In Petraeus’ case, most of them don’t represent actual military action as much as they do the general’s devotion to the institution of the U.S. Army and vice versa. According to an annotated photograph produced by the Times of London last year, the majority of ribbons on Petraeus’ impressive “rack” were earned for various flavors of distinguished service. As brave as he may be and as meritorious in general, is all that ostentation the best way to present the situation in Iraq to an increasingly war-skeptical public?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let me tell you, you smoldering ignorant turd, why the good General wears all of that stuff; because he earned it – and because somewhere there’s a sergeant major who knows he earned it and will verbally stomp a mud hole in the good general’s behind if he doesn’t see the general wearing each and every one of those badges and medals.<\/p>\n

There’s an Army Regulation that says he should wear them all – it’s called an AR 670-1 “Wear and Appearance of Army Uniform and Insignia”. Everything has a special place on the uniform – but I wouldn’t expect some half-witted goofball who can only find a job at the LA Times to know that, or bother even doing a Google search for some basic information.<\/p>\n

Which badges should he remove, DeBord? The Ranger Tab he got for 9 weeks of functioning as a combat leader under the most miserable conditions the Army can inflict? Or maybe his Master Parachutist wings? Maybe the German Parachutist wings? Or maybe all of the other stuff he earned and your stupid civilian ass couldn’t accomplish in a lifetime?<\/p>\n

If this what criticism of the war has come down to, maybe it’s time for all ya’all civilians to just leave the country. You’re really starting to grate on the rest of us’ nerves. No. Really.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read this at The Sniper, who got it from Curt at Flopping Aces who had … Martial bling<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,6,26,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antiwar-crowd","category-media","category-blather","category-support-the-troops"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}