LETTER FROM A SOLDIER
http://www.doctor-horsefeathers.com/

You sure won't find this in the NYTimes!

Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003, 11:09:09 GMT

Hey Guys, sorry it's been so long since I've sent anything but a quick
note to you individually. However things have been pretty hectic since
the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the
assholes in the press like to say over and over: 1) We did expect some
armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen; 2) It isn't any
worse than expected; 3) Things are getting better each day, and 4) The
morale of the troops is A-1, except for thenormal bitching and griping.

My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had the
cojones to be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is probably
over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland
Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking
Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S.

I'm in Baghdad now, since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar. It
looks, sounds and smells about the same but at least you can get
Maker's Mark at the local OC. We came up in mid-June to help set up
operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It represents a major (and long
overdue) shift in tactics. Instead of being sitting ducks for the
ragheads we now are going after the worthless pieces of fecal matter.
I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams from
the networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A
teams, seeking, finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are
well-armed, well-paid (in U.S. dollars) and always waiting to wail for
the press and then shoot some GI in the back in the midst of a crowd.

The only reason the GIs are ****ed (not demoralized) is that they
cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream
in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from
ABC,BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly
news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people
hate us.

Some do. But the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs
don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very
compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19
year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque
until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harms way. So did
the Iraqis.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human
shields. The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen
hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been
injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the
GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the
nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't
been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such
stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair
and balanced press? You know, nada.

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local
teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions
about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T-shirts,
Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian
knockoffs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the
GIs play it on their radios. They participate less and less in the
demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows
up in the neighborhood. The younger kids are going back to school
again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about the
Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal. They see the same GIs
who man the corner checkpoint, helping clear the playground, install
new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids
playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a couple
of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good but were having fun,
probably more than most Little Leaguers

The place is still a mess but most of it has been for years. But the
Hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought into the
21st Century. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are teaching
their docs new techniques and One American pharmaceutical company (you
know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about as greedy)
donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for a year.
Safe water is more available. Electricity has been restored to pre-war
levels but saboteurs keep cutting the lines. And The old
Ba'ath big shots are upset because they can't get fuel for their
private generators. One actually complained to General McKeirnan, who
told him it was a rough world.

The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing the
ones that weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they did
in East Berlin, Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols of Iraqi
cops and U.S./U.K./Polish MPs now in most of the larger cities. Basra
has 3.5 million inhabitants. Mosul is a city of 2 million. Kirkuk has 1
million. How many and hundreds of other small towns have not had riots
or shootings? The vast majority.

The six U.K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the ex-cops
they were rehabbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I talked to,
the town now has about twenty permanent vacancies in its police force.
Mick, he's a big potato eater from Belfast named Huggins and knows how
to handle terrorists after twenty years fighting with the IRA. He sends
his regards and says he'd love to have you here. Thinks you'd make a
great police chief, even though the cops would be more frightened of
you than the local hoods (then he laughed)

I heard one doofus on MSNBC the other night talk about how "nearly 60"
GIs have been killed since 01 May. The truth is that 21 GIs have been
killed in combat, mostly from ambush, from 01 May through 30 June,
Another 29 have been killed by accidents or other causes (two drowned
while swimming in the Tigris).

The [MSNBC turd] is the same jerk who reported on the air that "dozens
of GIs" were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an
Engineer Battalion that was parked by a construction site. The truck
was hit and burned, three GIs received minor injuries (including the
driver who burnt his hand) and three warriors of Allah were promptly
sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise. Hell of a way to get
laid.

A mosque in that s_hole Fallujah blew up this morning while the local
imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths
that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member
teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the local
Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans hit it
with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any mosque
left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and BBC. One
fool was dragging around a piece of tin with blood on it, claiming it
was part of the missile.

The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one
of my guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually
wore around his face that made him look like a girl. He was a local
leader of the Feyhadeen. We took the clown in custody and were asked
rather indignantly by the twit from BBC if we were trying to shut
up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and friends blown up. "I told
the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he
obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take
him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a
cell with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him
to headquarters. They declined the invitation. Guess what played on the
Bull**** Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a
mosque? See the poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing
his mosque and
relatives? Yep. Our friend the Palestinian.

Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters
and generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah. The only
thing that frightens them more is hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is
out that a trip to Guantanimo Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they
usually start squealing like the little mice they are, when an
interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No wonder the International Red Cross,
the National Council of Churches and the French keep protesting about
the place. They know it has proven to be very effective in keeping
several hundred real fanatical psychopaths in check and very frankly
would rather see them cut loose to go kill some more GIs or innocent
Americans, just to make W. look bad.

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park
them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a
couple of Bradleys pointed their way, if they decide to riot. Maybe a
few will get to Gitmo but most are human garbage that wouldn't take on
your five-year old grandson face-to-face. The more we go after them and
not vice-versa I think we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah,
they'll get lucky now and then, but it's
showtime, fellows.

Our first objective is to get the die-hards off the street (or make
them too scared to come out in them) and destroy their caches of
weapons (we have collected more than 227,000 A-47s and that is only the
tip of the iceberg; Curly bought nearly a million of them from our pal
Vladimir), then cut off their money supply, mostly from Syria and
Lebanon. We must continue to get public services up and running, so the
local families can get water, sewage and garbage service; electricity,
public transportation; oil fields and refineries working and a dinar
that won't halve in value every month.

It's going to be a long haul (remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and
West Germany) but if we don't stick with it, nobody else will, and
we'll have some other looney running the place again.

This place has greater potential than Saudi Arabia (bunch of goat-
herders who struck black gold) or Iran (weird dudes who can't run a rug
bazaar much less a major country).

I keep telling myself even the Democrats can't be that self-
destructive. But then I look at the current lineup. The cream of the
crap. If that lying lesbian bitch ever gets elected we're really in
trouble. By we, I mean the whole world. She'll slide just plain Bill in
as the Secretary-General of the U.N. and then the whole world will be
trying to take our great country ... the greatest ever
(and that's coming from an ex-Canuck) ... down and civilization with
it.

Armageddon, here we come. Remember, it's located on the outskirts of
Jerusalem.

Enough of that cheery speculation. The good news is that General
Schoonmaker is going to appointed Chief Army and the old man is coming
to Tampa to run the SpOps desk at CentComm. He's tops and will be
getting his second star. To me it means that SpOps will be more
predominant in future operations and after 18 years as a GB maybe I'll
have a shot at a bird-level combat command. The old man asked me to
come to MacDill and be his ACS but I told him after I spent four months
changing the diapers of the media types, I wanted to go back to action.
Hence, my current gig. As the movie quoted old General Patton,
"God help me, I love it." I do.

Nothing more satisfying than working with the BEST damn soldiers in the
world, flushing real human poop down the drain and giving some folks a
chance at trying freedom for a change. They may learn to like it and
then my great-great-grandson won't have to worry about some maniac
trying to destroy the planet.

My tour is over at the end of August, and I plan to return to Tampa,
brief the old man, then head to San Rafael and see my two sweethearts.
I'd like to visit my parents in Toronto and my brother in London,
before taking on a trip across the country. Just like any other family.
It will charge my batteries before I end up back in some other **** ...
er, interesting and challenging location. I hope to see most of you and
ask for some advice, not support. I know I've had that all
along. Thanks.

Now about that Maker's Mark.

God Bless America.

Mark

Excellent to see a side of the news the liberal media
will never present.

Thanks.


"Anonymous" wrote in message news:157769e7c51ffbc313236b8fd9f7173d@erisiandisco rd.de...
LETTER FROM A SOLDIER
http://www.doctor-horsefeathers.com/

You sure won't find this in the NYTimes!

Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003, 11:09:09 GMT

Hey Guys, sorry it's been so long since I've sent anything but a quick
note to you individually. However things have been pretty hectic since
the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite what the
assholes in the press like to say over and over: 1) We did expect some
armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen; 2) It isn't any
worse than expected; 3) Things are getting better each day, and 4) The
morale of the troops is A-1, except for thenormal bitching and griping.

My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had the
cojones to be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is probably
over, especially since we are back being criticized by the same Roland
Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel drinking
Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B.S.

I'm in Baghdad now, since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar. It
looks, sounds and smells about the same but at least you can get
Maker's Mark at the local OC. We came up in mid-June to help set up
operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It represents a major (and long
overdue) shift in tactics. Instead of being sitting ducks for the
ragheads we now are going after the worthless pieces of fecal matter.
I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams from
the networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A
teams, seeking, finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are
well-armed, well-paid (in U.S. dollars) and always waiting to wail for
the press and then shoot some GI in the back in the midst of a crowd.

The only reason the GIs are ****ed (not demoralized) is that they
cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that scream
in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from
ABC,BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next nightly
news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the Iraqi people
hate us.

Some do. But the vast majority don't and more and more see that the GIs
don't start anything, are by-and-large friendly, and very
compassionate, especially to kids and old people. I saw a bunch of 19
year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return fire coming from a mosque
until they got a group of elderly civilians out of harms way. So did
the Iraqis.

A bunch of bad guys used a group of women and children as human
shields. The GIs surrounded them and negotiated their surrender fifteen
hours later and when they discovered a three year-old girl had been
injured by the big tough guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the
GIs called in a MedVac helicopter to take her and her mother to the
nearest field hospital. The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't
been a problem in that neighborhood since. How many such
stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get reported in the fair
and balanced press? You know, nada.

The civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local
teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask questions
about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP T-shirts,
Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes (or Egyptian
knockoffs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to AFN when the
GIs play it on their radios. They participate less and less in the
demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe bad-ass shows
up in the neighborhood. The younger kids are going back to school
again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about the
Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal. They see the same GIs
who man the corner checkpoint, helping clear the playground, install
new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of kids
playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a couple
of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good but were having fun,
probably more than most Little Leaguers

The place is still a mess but most of it has been for years. But the
Hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought into the
21st Century. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are teaching
their docs new techniques and One American pharmaceutical company (you
know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about as greedy)
donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for a year.
Safe water is more available. Electricity has been restored to pre-war
levels but saboteurs keep cutting the lines. And The old
Ba'ath big shots are upset because they can't get fuel for their
private generators. One actually complained to General McKeirnan, who
told him it was a rough world.

The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing the
ones that weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they did
in East Berlin, Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols of Iraqi
cops and U.S./U.K./Polish MPs now in most of the larger cities. Basra
has 3.5 million inhabitants. Mosul is a city of 2 million. Kirkuk has 1
million. How many and hundreds of other small towns have not had riots
or shootings? The vast majority.

The six U.K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the ex-cops
they were rehabbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I talked to,
the town now has about twenty permanent vacancies in its police force.
Mick, he's a big potato eater from Belfast named Huggins and knows how
to handle terrorists after twenty years fighting with the IRA. He sends
his regards and says he'd love to have you here. Thinks you'd make a
great police chief, even though the cops would be more frightened of
you than the local hoods (then he laughed)

I heard one doofus on MSNBC the other night talk about how "nearly 60"
GIs have been killed since 01 May. The truth is that 21 GIs have been
killed in combat, mostly from ambush, from 01 May through 30 June,
Another 29 have been killed by accidents or other causes (two drowned
while swimming in the Tigris).

The [MSNBC turd] is the same jerk who reported on the air that "dozens
of GIs" were badly burned when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an
Engineer Battalion that was parked by a construction site. The truck
was hit and burned, three GIs received minor injuries (including the
driver who burnt his hand) and three warriors of Allah were promptly
sent to enjoy their 72 slave girls in Paradise. Hell of a way to get
laid.

A mosque in that s_hole Fallujah blew up this morning while the local
imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local loudmouths
that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas member
teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the local
Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans hit it
with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any mosque
left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and BBC. One
fool was dragging around a piece of tin with blood on it, claiming it
was part of the missile.

The cameras rolled and the idiot started repeating his story, then one
of my guys asked him in Arabic where he had left the rag he usually
wore around his face that made him look like a girl. He was a local
leader of the Feyhadeen. We took the clown in custody and were asked
rather indignantly by the twit from BBC if we were trying to shut
up "the poor man who had seen his mosque and friends blown up. "I told
the airy-fairy who the raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he
obviously didn't) he'd know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take
him down to the local jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a
cell with the "poor man" and they could interview him until we took him
to headquarters. They declined the invitation. Guess what played on the
Bull**** Broadcasting System that evening? Did the Americans blow up a
mosque? See the poor man who is still in a state of shock over losing
his mosque and
relatives? Yep. Our friend the Palestinian.

Our search and destroy missions are largely at night, free of reporters
and generally terrifying to those brave warriors of Allah. The only
thing that frightens them more is hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is
out that a trip to Guantanimo Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they
usually start squealing like the little mice they are, when an
interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No wonder the International Red Cross,
the National Council of Churches and the French keep protesting about
the place. They know it has proven to be very effective in keeping
several hundred real fanatical psychopaths in check and very frankly
would rather see them cut loose to go kill some more GIs or innocent
Americans, just to make W. look bad.

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will park
them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up by a
couple of Bradleys pointed their way, if they decide to riot. Maybe a
few will get to Gitmo but most are human garbage that wouldn't take on
your five-year old grandson face-to-face. The more we go after them and
not vice-versa I think we will see the sniper attacks go down. Yeah,
they'll get lucky now and then, but it's
showtime, fellows.

Our first objective is to get the die-hards off the street (or make
them too scared to come out in them) and destroy their caches of
weapons (we have collected more than 227,000 A-47s and that is only the
tip of the iceberg; Curly bought nearly a million of them from our pal
Vladimir), then cut off their money supply, mostly from Syria and
Lebanon. We must continue to get public services up and running, so the
local families can get water, sewage and garbage service; electricity,
public transportation; oil fields and refineries working and a dinar
that won't halve in value every month.

It's going to be a long haul (remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and
West Germany) but if we don't stick with it, nobody else will, and
we'll have some other looney running the place again.

This place has greater potential than Saudi Arabia (bunch of goat-
herders who struck black gold) or Iran (weird dudes who can't run a rug
bazaar much less a major country).

I keep telling myself even the Democrats can't be that self-
destructive. But then I look at the current lineup. The cream of the
crap. If that lying lesbian bitch ever gets elected we're really in
trouble. By we, I mean the whole world. She'll slide just plain Bill in
as the Secretary-General of the U.N. and then the whole world will be
trying to take our great country ... the greatest ever
(and that's coming from an ex-Canuck) ... down and civilization with
it.

Armageddon, here we come. Remember, it's located on the outskirts of
Jerusalem.

Enough of that cheery speculation. The good news is that General
Schoonmaker is going to appointed Chief Army and the old man is coming
to Tampa to run the SpOps desk at CentComm. He's tops and will be
getting his second star. To me it means that SpOps will be more
predominant in future operations and after 18 years as a GB maybe I'll
have a shot at a bird-level combat command. The old man asked me to
come to MacDill and be his ACS but I told him after I spent four months
changing the diapers of the media types, I wanted to go back to action.
Hence, my current gig. As the movie quoted old General Patton,
"God help me, I love it." I do.

Nothing more satisfying than working with the BEST damn soldiers in the
world, flushing real human poop down the drain and giving some folks a
chance at trying freedom for a change. They may learn to like it and
then my great-great-grandson won't have to worry about some maniac
trying to destroy the planet.

My tour is over at the end of August, and I plan to return to Tampa,
brief the old man, then head to San Rafael and see my two sweethearts.
I'd like to visit my parents in Toronto and my brother in London,
before taking on a trip across the country. Just like any other family.
It will charge my batteries before I end up back in some other **** ...
er, interesting and challenging location. I hope to see most of you and
ask for some advice, not support. I know I've had that all
along. Thanks.

Now about that Maker's Mark.

God Bless America.

Mark