LTTE from a soldier in Iraq

[babylonsister]

http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=125&article=46387

Carter speaks the truth

Though President Carter’s administration was not marked with stellar accomplishments (“Carter ‘a national disgrace,’” letter, May 30), this current one — which, by the way, had more years to do more — in many opinions home and abroad hasn’t been either.

Carter is one of few people who has the fortitude to speak the plain truth about this current one. It doesn’t surprise me that an officer would find such remarks offensive. We all know that many officers (not all) do encourage and seek deployments so that they may receive that cluster, bird or star.

Carter is saying what we soldiers have been saying these past five years. Sen. John Kerry’s words could not have been truer when he said that if you don’t get a good education, you will be “stuck in Iraq.”

This is my fourth deployment and I have not met one soldier who thinks we should be, or even wants to be, in Iraq. I just wish more of our leaders would stand up and hold their ground to those neoconservatives in Washington.

If we could get those Ann Coulter Republicans out of Congress, then maybe we can get home. Since this current administration is adamant on keeping us in this current quagmire, our only option is to wait until the 2008 elections and remove those truly senile and insane conservatives. What truly amazes me, though, is that they have money for wars, but can’t feed the poor.

Staff Sgt. Marlon R. Harris Sr.
Camp Liberty, Iraq

[tinymontgomery]

1. This is one brave soldier

He better watch himself. Nice slam on the officer corps.

[Lilith Velkor]

10. He might as well tell the truth; his number could come up any time.

[ellisonz]

2. Staff Sgt. Marlon R. Harris Sr. speaks the truth.

"What truly amazes me, though, is that they have money for wars, but can’t feed the poor."

I think someone would do well to send the sarge a copy of "The Assault on Reason."

:patriot: :patriot: :patriot: :patriot:

[babylonsister]

3. Yes, he does, and I'll bet he gets a lot of flak in the pages of Stars & Stripes

for saying it.

[ellisonz]

4. Without a doubt.

I'm sick of hearing how we need to expand the military. We can't even support the military we have. George W. Bush has done more damaged to the DoD than Bill Clinton ever did. The GOP wages war on our soldiers and their families; it is that simple. This man literally laid his life on the line to write that because God know's there are some real pricks out in the desert of Iraq.

:mad:

[ellisonz]

5. Kick!

:kick:

[ellisonz]

7. Kick.

:patriot:

[ellisonz]

8. Last kick.

The man has earned it:kick:

[proud patriot]

6. Thanks for posting

:hi:

[Jonathan50]

9. This sentence struck me..

"We all know that many officers (not all) do encourage and seek deployments so that they may receive that cluster, bird or star."


That is very true, promotions come quickly in combat and the higher level officers are not in any great danger. Certainly not as great a danger as the average trigger puller grunt.

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?isbn=0375508252

Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour: Armistice Day, 1918: World War I and Its Violent Climax
by Joseph E. Persico

Publisher Comments:
November 11, 1918. The final hours pulsate with tension as every man in the trenches hopes to escape the melancholy distinction of being the last to die in World War I. The Allied generals knew the fighting would end precisely at 11:00 A.M., yet in the final hours they flung men against an already beaten Germany. The result? Eleven thousand casualties suffered — more than during the D-Day invasion of Normandy. Why? Allied commanders wanted to punish the enemy to the very last moment and career officers saw a fast-fading chance for glory and promotion.

Joseph E. Persico puts the reader in the trenches with the forgotten and the famous — among the latter, Corporal Adolf Hitler, Captain Harry Truman, and Colonels Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Mainly, he follows ordinary soldiers' lives, illuminating their fate as the end approaches. Persico sets the last day of the war in historic context with a gripping reprise of all that led up to it, from the 1914 assassination of the Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, which ignited the war, to the raw racism black doughboys endured except when ordered to advance and die in the war's last hour. Persico recounts the war's bloody climax in a cinematic style that evokes All Quiet on the Western Front, Grand Illusion, and Paths of Glory.

The pointless fighting on the last day of the war is the perfect metaphor for the four years that preceded it, years of senseless slaughter for hollow purposes. This book is sure to become the definitive history of the end of a conflict Winston Churchill called "the hardest, cruelest, and least-rewarded of all the wars that have been fought."