Replies

I wouldn’t even say hip-pocket. The Army has clearly said this is not Army material. If it were Army material, it would have been staffed, and that would have required it making its way through a review by the Chaplaincy and by JAG, either of which would have flagged the “catholic” section without even a second thought.

I would say a powerpoint buck sergeant took some sources and put together a slide.

My concern would be the brainwashing in his earlier years that prevented him from seeing the silliness of some of the groups he placed on that list.

So, it’s a cultural/media issue and not a military issue.

For whatever it's worth, speaking as someone who has attended a fair number of EO presentations, who has been informally involved in “vetting” some EO presentations in the past, and whose wife spoke at an EO presentation, XZin’s explanation makes sense to me.

At least some of these presentations **DO** get prepared at a local level. I know because I've seen it — though from my experience, I've seen them get prepared by senior NCOs close to retirement who have been selected because they can “speak their minds” without worrying about career reprisals, or more rarely by mid-level officers, typically captains or majors.

I've seen good presentations and bad ones. Some really good ones included a briefing by a Japanese American World War II vet who was so angry at Japan after Pearl Harbor that he ended up making the US Army his career, and a speech by a retired black senior officer, a Vietnam vet, who talked about how he was so angry with the perception that “black soldiers won't fight” during the Vietnam War that he made a point of being the toughest soldier he could be during multiple tours in Vietnam so people wouldn't be able to say bad things about “black cowards” in uniform.

And then there have been some others which were a lot worse.

Yes, there are a lot of brainwashed idiots in America and some of them join the military. But I hope one lesson that the “politically correct crowd” takes out of this incident is that when they do bad things, they have a whole audience of uniformed people watching who may sit quietly and listen politely and then get copies and distribute them.

My personal view is that I've seen far less real racism in and around military installations than in the civilian world. That's a good thing for the military — having objective standards for performance and a culture of personal and group discipline is much easier to implement in the military than in many civilian career fields.

If people can accept the principle that the only colors which matter are “red, white, and blue,” I'm fine with that.