Define a hero.\u00a0 Is it someone that stands up to the enemy?\u00a0 Someone that saves a life?\u00a0 Someone that’s caught on camera at just the right moment?\u00a0 A lot of things could be considered heroic that the military does, but for the most part “doing your job” is still just doing your job.\u00a0 Doing the bare minimum while in the military is not looked well upon within the community will often earn you open scorn.\u00a0 If you were to use said minimum as a stump, and go on about how hard your life is for some drooling hippie, you’ll pretty much be black balled for life.\u00a0 We all know people like that.\u00a0 The guy that tells a sob story, to make the ladies all love his “heroism.”\u00a0 Even “speaking truth to power” is somehow heroic if you’re on the right side of the issue (but if you’re, say telling the truth about Benghazi you’re a liar).<\/p>\n
2nd Battalion 16th Infantry is a unit like any other.\u00a0 It’s ordered to do pretty much the same things every other light infantry battalion is ordered to do.\u00a0 For some reason however 2\/16 has more than it’s fair share of people trying to cash in on the unit’s illustrious, and sometime infamous history.\u00a0 We all know about Ward Reilly<\/a>, a faker that has gone around wearing a Ranger tab, he didn’t earn and saying he was a Ranger that refused service in Vietnam (which would have been hard seeing as the unit pulled out in 1970).\u00a0 He tried to cash in on 2\/16’s name, as an anti-war douche first for VVAW and now for IVAW.\u00a0 Then there’s Ethan McCord<\/a>.\u00a0 Now he’s said a lot of things, which have been proven to be flat out untrue (rotational fire<\/a> for instance) and taken videos from soldiers that were misbehaving<\/a> to blow incidents way<\/em> out of proportion.<\/p>\n But the Anti-war crowd’s darling hero has a bit of a shady side.\u00a0 For one, according to a source, [TSO<\/strong>: Deleted. \u00a0We don’t have a second source on this, and we’ll await more info. \u00a0What remains is as attributed, and is what we believe to be true.] \u00a0His first wife told me how he got the boot from the Navy Reserve, so in desperation he joined the Army.\u00a0 The only problem is apparently Army basic was too tough for him so he called back to see if his soon to be ex-wife he was in the process of divorcing would fake a red cross message that his son was deathly ill so he could go home.\u00a0 She hung up on him.\u00a0 Continuing his shady streak after Basic, he married his second wife the same month he divorced his first.\u00a0 Just to mess with her he, apparently, at one point he faked a PTSD episode while he was at the Ft Riley Warrior Transition Battalion.\u00a0 The “episode” was so bad that his wife was in a near panic calling the command, asking what she should do.\u00a0 The “episode” was resolved when he snapped out of it and said “just kidding.”\u00a0 His Med Board process was something of a joke, but the Army went through it anyway.<\/p>\n As for his life as a soldier, well its already been said by several of his former comrades that he sought to do the minimum.\u00a0 You really can’t blame a guy for being scared, but when you get to Iraq as an infantryman, it’s too late for second thoughts.\u00a0 The malingering and constant attempts to get out of going on patrol did not<\/em> make him popular.\u00a0 His NCOs refused to send him to the board, and there was some butt hurt about that because he had assured his wife (at the time) that he’d soon be E-5.\u00a0 To my knowledge his only<\/em> combat experience just so happened to be the same day some Apaches from 1\/227 Aviation responded to Bravo 2\/16’s troops in contact during Operation Ilaaj.\u00a0 It was a hot long day, that had Bravo in contact nearly all day.\u00a0 When all was said and done two Reuters photographers were dead, as well as the insurgents they were with, and a family that was on the battlefield for no apparent reason.\u00a0 McCord very shortly after went home on mid-tour leave and refused to come back.\u00a0 He probably would have been forgotten if not for a hissy fit thrown by Brianna Manning, and a man I like to call Ass-hat decided to release a video that was then two years old and call it “collateral murder<\/a>.”<\/p>\n In an instant he became a media darling.\u00a0 He was all over RT, and Susan Sarandon called him up urging him to stay strong (whatever that means).\u00a0 He joined “Not your soldiers” a truly hideous group of douchebags who lie to school children, then got married again and had more<\/em> kids (last count is at least five by three women).\u00a0 Then a documentary came out where he was the only featured speaker, and that documentary got nominated for an academy award.\u00a0 It got the 2\/16 veterans royally pissed and they all called him out<\/a> on it.\u00a0 I’m not sure if it was getting a tattoo of one of the company’s KIA’s that wasn’t even in his platoon (and who personally despised him) or that he said “collateral murder” happened every day in Iraq but the level of anger he incurred can not be understated.\u00a0 He then got delirious over how his former comrades were issuing “death threats<\/a>” (really just angry veterans hoping Karma struck and he got hit by a bus) and the hippies just gobbled that up.\u00a0 He got WAY<\/em><\/strong><\/a> <\/em>more attention than he should have, but thankfully his 15 minutes ended, and the veterans of 2\/16, as well as 1\/227 who’d had their names dragged through the mud went on to be the outstanding individuals they were.<\/p>\n