Just received this in an email. As a US Marine Corps Sergeant Veteran, I find this Cpl to be on point with his scripting.
Like the Cpl, we both worked in the South Tower (2 WTC) the tower that fell first on 911
Why We Need a Draft: A Marine's Lament
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Cpl. Mark Finelli
Newsweek
Updated: 12:20 p.m. ET Aug 28, 2007
"Maybe we would have only lost those three instead of 13," I thought to myself on a dusty Friday in Fallujah in early November 2005. I was picking up the pieces of a truck that hours before had been blown apart by an IED, wondering why our equipment wasn't better and why three more Marines were dead. Ramadan had just ended, the period in which a suicide bomber gets double and triple the virgins for killing himself in the name of jihad, and my weapons company, Second Battalion Second Marines, had lost 13 men in the last two weeks-not from firefights but from roadside bombs likely being imported from Iran. The insurgents were ramping up their technology, and here we were in the same old trucks. At least these didn't have cloth doors like the ones last year. But seriously, was this the best technology we have?
Just then I noticed a big vehicle driving by, one owned by a private contracting company. This thing made our truck look like a Pinto in a Ferrari showroom. It was huge, heavy, ominous, indestructible. I wanted to commandeer it. I wanted to live in it. If only we were in one of those, I would definitely come home, and a lot of the guys who won't would too. As it passed I stared at what I would later learn was called the MRAP vehicle (Mine Resistant Ambush Protective Vehicle). I never thought I would see something in Iraq that enticing, but there it was, rumbling past in all its glory.
I looked at my platoon sergeant. "Staff sergeant?"
"Yes, Finelli?"
"Why are the private companies driving around in these things and not the Marine Corps?" He looked at me and gave the universal sign for money, rubbing together his thumb and forefinger. And suddenly, I understood. It became clear on that November Friday in Fallujah that America's greatest strength, economics, was not in play. A sad realization.
According to the Pentagon, no service personnel have died in an MRAP. So why isn't every Marine or soldier in Iraq riding in one? Simple economics. An MRAP costs five times more than even the most up-armored Humvee. People need a personal, vested, blood-or-money interest to maximize potential. That is why capitalism has trumped communism time and again, but it is also why private contractors in Iraq have MRAPs while Marines don't. Because in actuality, America isn't practicing the basic tenet of capitalism on the battlefield with an all-volunteer military, and won't be until the reinstitution of the draft. Because until the wealthy have that vested interest, until it's the sons of senators and the wealthy upper classes sitting in those trucks-it takes more than the McCain boy or the son of Sen. Jim Webb-the best gear won't get paid for on an infantryman's timetable. Eighteen months after the Marines first asked for the MRAP, it's finally being delivered. Though not nearly at the rate that's needed. By the end of the year, only 1,500 will have been delivered, less than half the 3,900 the Pentagon had initially promised.
Marine