THE US, THE UN AND THE IRAQIS THEMSELVES, V. 7.0

Thanks for the confirm, Ican. Was the 45,000 ft ceiling at the time the plane was known as 25BGF?

Separately, aren't you a fan of Boyd?

And yes I've seen the frontline special and declared the slant they put on it to be mostly bunk.

Is the Army broken?

Yeah, I think so. We're on the brink. We are in a situation where we are grossly overdeployed, and it is unlike any other period in the 229-year history of the Army. We have never conducted a sustained combat operation with a volunteer force, with a force that we have to compete in the job market to hire every year. Every other force that we've ever done this with, going back to the Vietnam period to something comparable, has been a draftee conscript force.

So what we are all worried about is that the manpower situation will come unglued. ... The Army is people; it's not weapons or platforms. Somebody once said, "A soldier's not in the Army; they are the Army." And the quality of the soldiers [has] been the enormous advantage we've had since the volunteer force was put in place, and the quality of the noncommissioned officers corps.

Well, that is a married Army, among other things. You may recruit soldiers, but you retain families. And I think we're all concerned that we are teetering on the brink here and that if we can't get to a lower operational tempo, or at least have some point in the future that we can set our sails against where it might occur, that the Army on the manpower side's going to come unglued.

Ican is not without 'perception'.

Foxfyre wrote:

... he did gave aid and comfort to the enemy. It is that, more than anything else, for which most of his fellow servicemen hold him in contempt.

As usual your comments are right on the mark.

From Revel's link [my emhasis added]:

Quote:

Contrary to what those critics, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, have implied, Kerry was speaking on behalf of many soldiers when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971, and said this:

They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.

Kerry alleged he was speaking on behalf of "many soldiers". That many has not been shown to be even one-hundredth of one percent. The bold face statement converts this Kerry statement from an accusation against particular soldiers to a general accusation against all the troops in Vietnam. It implies the inclusion of those in his Swift Boat brigade plus his superior officers to the highest levels. Even if I were to assume it true that the specific atrocities about which Kerry spoke were true, lacking any evidence to the contrary, Kerry's bold face statement is a bold face falsification of the general behavior of our troops. In that regard, it constitutes a terrible slander.

It strikes me in the litany of sins posted by Revel, that these were apparently known already to the military by the time John Kerry testified about them, and those committing the sins were prosecuted to the fullest extent of military law. This in itself would confirm 1) that these were not common occurrences and were in fact rare anomalies among our servicemen and 2) they were in no way condoned or tolerated by the military.

I don't know how many hundreds of thousands of U.S. service personnel served in Vietnam - I know 55,000 plus died. John Kerry's testimony suggested the atrocities were common and he did not say he had not committed these or that the men he served with served honorably and bravely.

Moreover the way in which he did gave aid and comfort to the enemy. It is that, more than anything else, for which most of his fellow servicemen hold him in contempt.

Of course they shot dogs, they would shoot anything, that's not so strange or difficult to believe is it.

Hell, they dropped Agent Orange on the forest. That would kill countless billions of creatures. Dogs? We're concerned about shooting dogs, in this context? Why?

Now I am just wondering on what cause I am going to spend all the energy that I spent on this cause.

Folks, hope it's OK to post this here - I LOVE Learjets. That one is the 25D mentioned by Ican.

Quote:

Now I am just wondering on what cause I am going to spend all the energy that I spent on this cause.

Good question, revel. I, too, am feeling disheartened. But, as Vaclav Havel said:

"Work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed."

He said it in a different way: "Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but he certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."