You know things are bad in this country when the Republicans can transform John Murtha into a pacifist traitor and "swift boat" into a pejorative. Now when I see the slime machine getting cranked up to go after another veteran I get furious. So of course when I came across this little gem of an article on Soldiers for the Truth website by Matt Dodd [
http://www.sftt.us/...]I went ballistic.
Mr Dodd a self-described military man himself was responding to an article on Military.com "Predictable Atrocities", [
http://www.military.com/...] written by Capt. Wade R. Sanders. The good Captain was giving his opinion of the Haditha incident based on his own combat experience in Vietnam. Unfortunately for Capt. Sanders, a decorated veteran and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy he made the fatal mistake of being critical of the Iraq war and by extension the Bush administration. Just like John Kerry and John Murtha combat service is not enough for pukes like Dodd. In their minds if your "not on the Bush team" you're a terrorist sympathizer. So rather than argue on the facts Matt Dodd called Capt. Sanders' support for the troops into question and went so far as to insinuate that his service itself was not that distinguished. After screaming at my computer screen for half an hour I managed to get myself together and fire off an email to Mr. Dodd.
Mr Dodd:
I am so sick of people like you who have never actually served in Iraq whining about how criticism of this war is somehow blaming America first. I respect the fact that you had the decency enough to make sure you stated that you never served in combat. As a person who was not combat arms but who did serve in Operation Enduring Freedom, let me make this clear: I don't care how tough you were during your career; FTX's with no sleep and no shower for weeks are not the same as having multiple deployments in a country with no direction, no allies, and no strategy. Since you are so gun-ho I suggest you come out of retirement and go serve in this president's endless "war on terror". Instead of putting your boots where your mouth is you make up excuses and choose to be a Bush cheerleader and then cry about the rest of us who see this operation for what it is, a failure. This administration calls people unpatriotic when they question their policies while they go behind these soldiers' backs and dismantle any real pursuit of Osama and abandon Afghanistan.
Even though you bemoan Capt. Sander's politics your own political agenda is obvious when you talk about his career and you emphasize that he served during the Clinton Administration. Now I've never met the man so I take his military record at face value (as I do yours), but you almost seem to question whether his service was really all that distinguished. You also question whether he truly has a grasp of the importance of men and women dying for the Bush policy as opposed to those who served during the Vietnam War. Well I hate to break it to you but the fact that you are now retired means that you completed some or most of your military career on Clinton's watch. I am no Clinton fan but the fact that you could complete your career without ever having served in combat speaks volumes for whatever policy we followed in those years. By any real analysis Iraq is a failure and right now our troops are there because people like you are so afraid to acknowledge this administration has failed, you would rather continue sending our men and women into a meat grinder than admit the incompetence of this president.
Speaking of political agenda's when I came off of active duty in August of 2003 the people at the demobilization station in Ft. Stewart didn't even know what to put on the DD214 because this president and this congress put their "political agenda" ahead of sound policy. You see the MOB site had conflicting orders from Defense on what to call the actual operation that we were activated under. Eventually they got a memo from the DOD retracting one award Operation Iraqi Freedom and changing it to Operation Enduring Freedom. Now I wonder whose political agenda that served? In closing, if you have ever been deep sea fishing maybe you will understand this analogy. I have a buddy of mine who is in an infantry National Guard unit currently on deployment. Some of the folks in his unit have adopted a nickname for soldiers who go on patrol on dark roads to nowhere in Iraq. CHUM.