Bush leaves awe in his Baghdad wake (good read)

telegraph india ^ | 11/28/03

[MEG33]

One for the books,indeed!

[lentulusgracchus]

Any of you Army/Marine guys know about Charlie using RPG's?

I wasn't over there, and I'm ex-Navy, but I know that the VC and NVA were prolific users of RPG's. Early in the war, the VC liked recoilless rifles, but RPG's were more portable. They used the early RPG-2, called B-40 by the Chinese, and they'd penetrate the side armor of an APC. I don't know how effective they were against tanks. I don't remember reading about the bigger RPG-7 until the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

For more firepower against bunkers and armor later in the Vietnamese War, the NVA deployed AT-2 (or -3?) "Saggers", which were wire-guided suitcase weapons. You could consider them RPG's on steroids, except that they were big enough that they required a lowboy launcher rail set up on the ground. Their first use was in southern South Vietnam, where the NVA used them to destroy two ARVN M-41 Walker Bulldog light tanks and a bunker during a big fight -- An Loc, I think, but I'm fuzzy on details. The Egyptians used "Saggers" to great effect during the Yom Kippur War, and they appeared in both Gulf Wars. I recall seeing some footage from Iraq of our guys using a captured "Sagger" to decommission an Iraqi bunker they'd overrun. OJT on the other guy's toys -- they looked like they were having a good time, and they got the job done.

[Pro-Bush]

A class act indeed!

[jla]

FYI: Weaponry today is a 'tad' more sophisticated than in LBJ & Nixon's day.
President Bush is a definite target of the world's terrorists, where the former two were not.
Letting bravado rule, instead of common sense, Bush would have put the lives of White House aides, news people, and the troops at risk.

[Clara Lou]

I thought this was a big deal and a brave move but the more I read about it- the sicker I get.
Then it would be my personal opinion that you need to buzz on over to DU and commiserate with them. The NYT forum has plenty of people over there that you can commiserate with as well. I think you'd be more at home. They're all sick about it too. Feh!

[Clara Lou]

You are a sniveling, whiny, panty-waste know-it-all "more-principled-than-thou" blowhard who insists on being the turd in every punchbowl..
Bravo, sir, bravo!! Well said to one who well deserves it!

[Eala]

That would be a nasty thing to serve the troops... LOL.

[arasina]

Thanks. I like your pic as well. I guess mine looks more like she is the stuffing, so I'm happy with it. :o)

[Ann Archy]

OK....OK....I concede. I guess what Bush did was just nothing.

[painter]

"Especially not from a gutless and stateless coward."

You mean Bill Clinton!!

[rdb3]

Sometime in 2144 or afterward, some PhD candidate will do a monograph on "public brawling styles of the 20th-century American Left", and your post will be cited in a footnote.

It's the 21^st century, okay?

[VOA]

OK....OK....I concede. I guess what Bush did was just nothing.

You weren't getting heat from me...I was just injecting what little I knew
about the life-history of the RPGs.

As for Dubya's "Thanksgiving Suprise", I was whooping and hollaring when I heard
radio-show host Dennis Prager break into his show to announce it at about 9:30 AM
Pacific Time on Thursday!
And I'm still occassionally hollarin' and whoopin' it up!

It WAS and still is A BIG DEAL.
Bill or Hillary! Clinton couldn't have paid those soldiers in that tent to
respond in such a spontaneous "Hail To The Chief" moment even if Bill or
Hillary! were turned into some sort of deified Augustus Caesar!

[HardStarboard]

Burkie, don't you ever get tired of getting your chain jerked? Got to give one point to you for being a glutton for punishment.

[attiladhun2]

You better believe it. I'm from Cailifornia and at least we voted out here to OUTLAW a couple of queers getting "married." Move over CA, the Bay State is now the fruit and nut capital of the world.

[Patriotic Bostonian]

Burkie is a phoney! He's always on the otherside. Read his profile page and tell me he's not a phoney and a coward to boot.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Check this out.

[XBob]

Thanks for the compliment, I spent too many years working that war in various places. It's been a long time 30+years, and sometimes my memory fails me. Saigon or Cam Rahn - all the same to me - that isn't where the war was, they were both 'resorts'.

And here is what I remember of our SAM problem - (note the F-4 in the upper right - 60 feet long to give you an idea of the size of the explosion). Sort of hard to get that into your pack.

I get rather perturbed at some young (in fact he wasn't even born when I was fighting for him - (what a waste) , liberal, ignoramouses, who don't know anything, and never did anything trying to tell us that did, how to do it. He's the type that lost us the Vietnam war, and is trying to get us to lose the current war.

[CDHart]

"We ought to raid their country and liberate our war dead from their soil."

Yes, we should. I would not like to have a family member buried in France. I'm an Army brat and my father was a battalion commander until his death in 1956 on active duty. He had no respect for the French and agreed with Patton that we should have turned our guns on the Russians. Might have saved us a whole lot of trouble in the long run.

Carolyn

[iconoclast]

Philip Taubman, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, said that "in this day and age, there should have been a way to take more reporters. People are perfectly capable of maintaining a confidence for security reasons. It's a bad precedent."

Liberal Jews are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Most of them will be neocon converts by the next election.

[DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet]

Check out the link in 136.

God bless you, XBob - thank you so much for your service.