General Petraeus on the conditions on the ground in Iraq

mysteryman wrote:

parados wrote:

Well MM.. it seems you lied about him not being in the military database.

Now we should just let you skate on that lie and move on to your next round of making up stuff?

I did not lie.
I did not find his name when I did a quick look.
There is a difference.
IF this person actually is in the military,then I will admit I was wrong.

Yeah, the difference is you didn't do any due diligence before claiming something didn't exist that did.

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Now,are you willing to address the things that he says happened that could NOT have happened,either because the things he mentioned dont exist or are not physically possible?

I am curious how you think soldiers get their helmets on and off MM. It is entirely possible to put something on top of your head and pull the helmet on over the top of it. The helmet might not fit well and might be uncomfortable but to claim he can't do it is to deny reality. It was a small portion of the skull, I doubt it was more than 1/4" thick and the person that did it said he would have to pick bone out of his scalp meaning the helmet pushed the skull portion tighter against his own head. Not impossible at all. Again, you have presented an argument that it was "impossible' while in reality it is not only possible but probable that it could be done.

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I will be glad to post the articles he wrote and let you try and defend obvious lies,like when he claims that someone picked up a 9 millimeter round with a "square back" that he claims came from a Glock?

Please do post them. I will be happy to see what was "impossible" and what you just don't want to believe no matter what the reality is.

n Baghdad, a busted infrastructure has left entire neighborhoods navigable by vehicle only. The sector we soldiers patrol is known unaffectionately as "Little Venice" because of the dark brown rivers of sewage that backwash from broken pipes. The biggest fear in these parts isn't sniper fire or IEDs, but a flat tire that forces you to wade through the reeking fluids. Occasionally, that fear is realized--like on the day when I met Ali.

When pulling security for a crew that's changing a tire, you need to make sure that your head is constantly moving, if only to provide snipers with the illusion that you're paying attention. It's especially important to keep up the movement when talking to local nationals (LNs). There are very few we trust to give us accurate information about insurgents; they usually just complain about big issues that are out of our hands.

It was during one of these head-swiveling sessions that a short but unusually healthy-looking Iraqi kid approached out of my periphery wearing an Adidas hat and snowboarding t-shirt, his lower torso swallowed by one of Little Venice's excrement canals. It was no surprise that he spoke some English. Every Iraqi can speak English well enough to ask for things they want from American soldiers.





"Mistah Mistah, give me $50," he demanded, somewhat politely compared with other children. But I was still taken aback by the sum.

"Oh, hell no. ... Are you kidding?" I began laughing, and he joined in, aware that the amount he had requested was outrageous.

"Yes, I know," he said, placing his right hand over his heart the way Iraqis do when they greet you formally or apologize for something. "What is your name?"

"My name's Scott. What's yours?" My head was still on a swivel, and I was pacing in slow arcs back and forth between the pit crew changing the tire and a small alley jutting off to the left. Alleys are a prime spot for people to lean out of, shoot a rocket-propelled grenade from, and then disappear back into.

"Here, in Iraq, my name is Ali. But, in California, my name is James Bond."

"No way ... that's awesome!"

"Yes, are you from California?"

"No, I'm from St. Louis." He wrinkled his nose in confusion, the way most Iraqis do when I tell them that I'm from St. Louis.

"It's near Chicago."

"Ah, yes, Chicago. ... Go Cubs."

"How do you know so much about America? How do you speak English so well?"

"My family lives in Los Angeles. In California."

"No ****. ... Do you want to move there someday?"

"Yes, I will. Then I will do this..." and he pointed at me.

"What? Join the Army?"

"Yes."

"Don't. Go to college instead." Maybe his English wasn't as accomplished as I had assumed, because he seemed confused.

"Look, look ..." he said, taking a piece of chalk out of his pocket and wading over to a crumbling brick wall. He wrote "USA" backward, in an Arabic fashion, then turned to me with a huge smile and pointed at what he had done. "See, see."

"Yeah, wow, cool," I said, leaning into the alley on the left and glancing up at the satellite dishes on its rooftops.

"Thomas!" yelled the gunner on top of my vehicle, giving me the finger circling in the air signal, which means that it's time to mount up.

I started to get back in my vehicle. "Well, Mr. Bond--Mr. James Bond-- I hope you enjoy California."

The next day's mission set list didn't include me. I had tower guard from 0400 until 0800 instead. I went to guard shift, then got some sleep. When I woke up, the next day's patrol had already returned, and, as usual, the gaggle of guys who walked in and out of my room gave me updates on what had happened, who had been shot at, who had fucked up, who had chickened out, who had pulled off some great stunt of ingenuity. One of the privates sauntered in with a somewhat bemused expression.

"Hey, we were in Little Venice today, talking to LNs and ****."

"Anything happen?"

"Sort of. That James Bond kid you were telling me about--did he run around in an Adidas hat?"

"Yeah, why?"

"Those fuckers cut off his tongue."

"What? Who?"

"Shia militia, the police, I don't know. Apparently he had been talking to too many Americans."

"No ******* way."

"Yeah. **** them, man. I hate when this **** happens to kids."

We didn't go back to Little Venice for a raid or patrol or mission of any type for quite some time--maybe a month or two. But when we did eventually go back, I didn't have to look very hard to find Ali. He was mixed in with the throng of children who waded up to our convoy screaming for us to throw them chocolate or soccer balls. Of course, he wasn't screaming, but he was smiling and his hands were outstretched to catch whatever a soldier with a generous streak might be kind enough to throw at him. I wanted to yell, "Hey, James Bond! I hope you get to California!"--but I didn't. I just watched him scramble for the soccer ball that went bobbing away toward an alley and out of my field of vision.

It was with a strange mix of regret and sadness that I went to the phone center post-mission and called my parents. I spared them the gory story of Ali and his violent silencing. I spared them my own ambivalence about feeling obligated to protect "those people" by putting my own life on the line. I also spared them the primitive guilt I felt at not being able to help a child. I realized that the more guilt I felt about being unable to help a specific person, the more ambivalent I became toward the population in general. It felt very un-American to have such a subtle balance of apathy and rage and remorse and fear operating simultaneously, but I was comforted to know that I wasn't alone. All of the Joes feel this way. We rarely mention it back on base--maybe because it's so obvious and maybe because there isn't any point. We are usually too busy getting ready for our next mission, anyway.

n the last hour of any patrol in Baghdad, things start to slow down. Conversations are filled with comfortable silences that stretch themselves out. Everyone gets a little bit restless to head back to beds, food, and relative safety. No one wants anything to happen that would keep us out longer than necessary.

That's why I could feel the exasperation in the Humvee when the call went out over the radio one night last December for everyone to stop. The senior non-commissioned officer in my vehicle called up over the radio network and asked what the holdup was. A pause followed. The lead vehicle said there were dogs, a lot of them, fighting over something.

This didn't seem like a reason to stop. If you patrol Baghdad at night, you end up sharing the streets with dogs. Thousands of them roam the darkened city, some mangy, others well-groomed, promenading through piles of garbage and bricks. Sometimes, when they're alone, they pass by nearly undetectable except for the quiet scraping of their unclipped claws along the alleyways and the strange iridescent glow of their eyes. More often, they congregate in giant packs. They fight and howl and bark, and they are louder than the people who inhabit the city during the daytime. But we had never had a reason to stop for them before. "Jesus Christ," said Specialist Hernandez, a passenger in our Humvee. "I thought we were supposed to be keeping Iraqis from fighting each other, not dogs."





Before anyone could respond, the lead vehicle came back up over the net. The dogs were eating a human body. More precisely, they were eating out of a human body. Apparently, they were only eating the brain.



his wasn't the first dead body I had seen in Baghdad. Religious factions, and factions within factions, kill one another on a daily basis. It's less often, maybe only a few times a month, that we find the dumped bodies. The point of dumping a body is to send a message. The killers want as many people as possible in the neighborhood to be exposed to it.

A mob of dusty kids who were shouting excitedly, running around corners, and pointing led us to our first body at the beginning of my deployment. Eventually they stopped and circled around a man hog-tied and stiff on the side of the road. There weren't any large pools of blood, so we knew that he had been killed somewhere else and dropped in this particular neighborhood for some particular reason. His eyes had been gouged out, and there were minor lacerations on his arms and face. He had been kidnapped, tortured, and executed.

For most of us, it was the first dead human we had seen outside of a funeral parlor, so we momentarily froze with some strange mixture of revulsion and reverence. The kids had already scattered or were asking for chocolate, their parents smoking butts in doorways, sending us tired and helpless glances.



he patrol leader didn't want too many boots on the ground just to recover a body, so only four of us got out of the Humvee. We stopped our vehicle about 15 meters from the pack of dogs. "Should we shoot them?" Hernandez asked the patrol leader.

"Nah, I think they're just starving," he answered.

Almost within arm's reach of the body, two of the more deranged, wild-looking dogs were still pursing back their lips to scoop up brain tissue with their fangs. Hernandez kicked the nearest one in its protruding ribs. The dog didn't make a sound--it just rolled off into the darkness.

Having scattered the dogs, we all looked at the dead body in front of us, pretending to think of a way to move it. The man was lying on his back. His hands and feet were free, but the top of his head had been blown away. Maybe it was a failed kidnapping. He was a big guy, maybe six feet tall and a little on the obese side. He could've struggled, and, instead of a routine execution, they had to shoot him in the head in a really quick and sloppy way. But why had the body stayed here this long without being reported? The locals usually either wave down an American patrol, call the tip hotline, or at least tell the police.

Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

"How close is the nearest IP station?" I asked.

"It's actually on this street, about five hundred meters south. We would be able to see it without optics if it were daylight," the patrol leader said.

"Are we gonna drop the body off?" Hernandez asked.

"Nah, they can clean up after themselves. We'll swing by and tell them to pick up the body."

As we slowly started moving back toward the Humvee, we could hear the dogs filling in the space behind us. I turned around and saw their green eyes flashing in the deep shadow where we'd left the body. Part of me thought we should have shot the dogs or done something to keep them from eating the body, but what good would it have done? We only would have been exposing ourselves to danger longer than we needed to.

Back in the Humvee, Hernandez started talking to me without looking in my direction. "Man, I've never seen anything like that before," he said.

"What? A guy killed by a cop?" I asked.

"No, man, zombie dogs. That **** was wild," he said, laughing.

Something inside of me fought for expression and then died. He was right. What else was there to do now but laugh?

"I took his driver's license," I said.

"You did?" questioned Hernandez.

"Yeah. It said he was an organ donor."

We chuckled in the dark for a moment, and then looked out the window into the night. We didn't talk again until we were back at our base.

Someone reached down and picked a shell casing up off the ground. It was 9mm with a square back. Everything suddenly became clear. The only shell casings that look like that belong to Glocks. And the only people who use Glocks are the Iraqi police.

parados wrote:

So ,what do you think he described that a Bradley can't do MM?

Here is what he wrote about how a BFV was used to kill dogs...

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I know another private who really only enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs. Occasionally, the brave ones would chase the Bradleys, barking at them like they bark at trash trucks in America--providing him with the perfect opportunity to suddenly swerve and catch a leg or a tail in the vehicle's tracks. He kept a tally of his kills in a little green notebook that sat on the dashboard of the driver's hatch. One particular day, he killed three dogs. He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks

Soldiers and military vehicle specialists intimately familiar with Bradley IFVs have flatly stated that these vehicles cannot be driven as described in Thomas' account due to their construction and the limitations of the laws of physics.


Now,here is how the army describes a BFV...
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/land/m2.htm

A BFV CANNOT go over concrete barriers,it would get hung up.
It Cant be used to knock down corners of buildings because of where and how its weapons are located and because of where the drivers obsdervation port is.

Now,in this first article he talks about changing a tire,in an alleyway.
Since he mentioned changing a tire,that could only mean either a humvee or a eight-wheeled Stryker Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs).

Both of those vehicles have "run flat" tires,designed to go about 50 miles even when they have flat tires.
So,there is NO way that a patrol would stop in an alley to change tires,it just is not done.

When pulling security for a crew that's changing a tire, you need to make sure that your head is constantly moving, if only to provide snipers with the illusion that you're paying attention.

First of all,there are NO rifles or pistols anywhere in the world that use ammo with "square backs".,and I defy you to show me even one weapon that uses them.

Also,many US soldiers carry Glocks as their personnel sidearm,brought from home.

The possession of POW's (Personally Owned Weapons) is a violation of the Multinational Corps Iraq General Order Number One ... and can result in an Article 15 Proceeding or a Courts Martial...

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Now,in this first article he talks about changing a tire,in an alleyway.
Since he mentioned changing a tire,that could only mean either a humvee or a eight-wheeled Stryker Infantry Combat Vehicles (ICVs).

Both of those vehicles have "run flat" tires,designed to go about 50 miles even when they have flat tires.
So,there is NO way that a patrol would stop in an alley to change tires,it just is not done.

Again you make an assumption that isn't in the story.. Let's read what he said again...

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When pulling security for a crew that's changing a tire, you need to make sure that your head is constantly moving, if only to provide snipers with the illusion that you're paying attention.

Now, you assume that the only vehicles that the US has in Iraq are Humvees and Strykers. The story never states it was one of the patrol's vehicles that has a flat. Transportation companies move equipment and supplies through Iraq. Transportation companies drive vehicles other than Humvees and Strykers. I am curious as to who these people are that claim that there are no transport vehicles in Iraq. Do you really think someone that believes the only US wheeled vehicles in Iraq are Strykers and Humvees knows what the f*** they are talking about? I don't.

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First of all,there are NO rifles or pistols anywhere in the world that use ammo with "square backs".,and I defy you to show me even one weapon that uses them.

I have no idea what the meaning is of "square back." Nor do you. It could mean the shape of the firing pin impression for all we know. Yet you jump onto this idea that it means the bullet itself was square. I don't think it means that and you can't show that your interpretation is the ONLY possible meaning for "square back".

The sector we soldiers patrol is known unaffectionately as "Little Venice" because of the dark brown rivers of sewage that backwash from broken pipes.

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Also,many US soldiers carry Glocks as their personnel sidearm,brought from home.

So, you are saying that many US soldiers are breaking the prohibition on personal weapons?

Here is a discussion by several vets talking about how and why you should not bring your own weapon from home.
http://www.thehighroad.org/showthread.php?t=207863

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The possession of POW's (Personally Owned Weapons) is a violation of the Multinational Corps Iraq General Order Number One ... and can result in an Article 15 Proceeding or a Courts Martial...

You know MM.. your failure to check your facts is becoming rather tedious.
First you claim there is no such person in the military, which turns out to be untrue.
Then you claim there are only Humvees and Strykers in Iraq.
Then you claim lots of US soldiers are carrying personal weapons in violation of General Order Number One.

I find it telling that instead of realizing that the person that wrote these stories is wrong,you are defending him.

You seemed to ignore this part...

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The sector we soldiers patrol is known unaffectionately as "Little Venice" because of the dark brown rivers of sewage that backwash from broken pipes.

When pulling security for a crew that's changing a tire, you need to make sure that your head is constantly moving, if only to provide snipers with the illusion that you're paying attention.

So,he is talking about being on patrol.

I never said there werent more wheeled vehicles in the US inventory,but the ones I mentioned are the ones used when on patrol.

You dont seriously think that a transport company would be on patrol using their big trucks or other equipment!!
If you do,you are showing a remarkable ignorance about how combat patrols are carried out.

As far as the "square back" round goes,it cannot mean the firing pin.
The firing pin on every pistol or rifle is more pointed then anything else,and it is in no way square.

Also,he specified "shell casing", that is the part that is ejected after the round is fired.
That means that the round was in the magazine of whatever weapon,in this case a Glock,the weapon came from.
There is no way that is possible.
A square round would get jammed,IF it even fit at all.

Your lack of knowledge about weapons is staggering.
I would suggest you go to a local gun shop and ask them about "square back" rounds.
You will see that they do not exist.

By now, Murdough and his commanding officer, Lt. Col. John Norris, were making progress in the investigation. They had evidence that pointed to police involvement in the slayings: In the empty lot where six of the kidnapping victims had been found shot to death, U.S. soldiers discovered shell casings that bore the characteristic square indentation made by a Glock handgun, a sidearm rare in Iraq except among the American-armed security forces.