An army of one and his 50 fiancées

msnbc.com ^ | June 11, 2003 | msnbc.com

[scab4faa]

June 11 — While Col. Kassem Saleh was stationed in Afghanistan, he had plenty of support from back home. He could count on emails, letters and phone calls from his women — more than 50 fiancées who he met through Internet dating services. Now these women, recently clued in to his “chronic courting,” want the Army to take action, according to a report in Wednesday’s New York Times.

FOR YEARS, according to some of the women, Saleh met women through Web sites like tallpersonals.com, match.com and christiansingles.com. What ensued were flowery emails, letters and satellite telephone calls from his bases in Afghanistan. “He wrote better than Yeats. He wrote better than Shakespeare. He totally intoxicated you with his feelings: ‘Oh, baby, I want to tell you how much I miss you.’ ‘I can’t wait to get home to you,’ ” Robin Solod, 43, told the Times. A member of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, N.C., Col. Saleh headed reconstruction and humanitarian efforts for the U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan, Army spokesman Col. Roger King, told the Times. The women want the Army to punish Saleh and according to King, the Army is investigating the matter, the Times reported. His scheme fell apart this spring when a local Washington television station broadcast a story about a woman who was engaged to Saleh. MSNBC.com’s local news Web site picked up the story and other women who thought they were Saleh’s betrothed called the television station.

[scab4faa]

I don't understand what they want the Army to do abhout this? Is there a legal limit to how many fiancee's you can have?

[DoughtyOne]

An army of one, a harem of many...

[Cathryn Crawford]

That was my question. He's a scumbag, but, still, where's the crime?

[Feiny]

Better than Yeats & Shakespeare? I doubt it.

[Grand Old Partisan]

Conduct unbecomng, and all that

[BossLady]

Wonder if any of them had engagement rings????? He must have got a bulk discount! LOL

[facedown]

Better than Yeats & Shakespeare? I doubt it.

Anybody who would fall for this sap has never read either one.

[xJones]

don't understand what they want the Army to do abhout this? Is there a legal limit to how many fiancee's you can have?

Really massive breach of promises?

We are not a group of stupid, naïve women,” Sarah Calder, 33, told the Times. “We are bright, intellectual, professional women.

Let us be grateful we are not the Army personnel in charge of investigating this. :)

[MinuteGal]

No crime from the sketchy info reported. It will be a crime if further investigation shows he bilked money from any of them.

At any rate, and figuratively speaking, would you like a lying, untrustworthy, deceiving officer in a foxhole with you during battle?

Leni

[Lazamataz]

That was my question. He's a scumbag, but, still, where's the crime?

Theft.

He stole their hearts!

[MinuteGal]

Probably more like Omar Khayyam than Yeats and Shakespeare.

Leni

[dandelion]

In Texas, we call it "breach of contract". Whup whup, don' go messin' wit' Texas wimmin...

[NEWwoman]

I saw a reverse of this on the old 1960s sitcom "Gomer Pyle, USMC".

It seems Gomer was suckered into a marriage proposal - which he really didn't make - by a con artist. When he tried to back out, she was going to sue him for breach of promise. That was her scam.

Yes, it was a stupid TV show, but could there be something to suing for breach of promise?

[SwinneySwitch]

“We are not a group of stupid, naïve women,” Sarah Calder, 33, told the Times. “We are bright, intellectual, professional women. I can’t tell you how much he wooed us with his words. He made us feel like goddesses, fairy princesses, Cinderellas. We had all found our Superman, our knight in shining armor.”

I rest my case.

[solzhenitsyn]

What a totally selfish sicko. It's cruel for a man to toy with womens' affections. Even if he hasn't broken the law, that doesn't make it any less a crime. Just means we can't lock him up.

[Pukin Dog]

“We are not a group of stupid, naïve women,” Sarah Calder, 33, told the Times. “We are bright, intellectual, professional women. I can’t tell you how much he wooed us with his words. He made us feel like goddesses, fairy princesses, Cinderellas. We had all found our Superman, our knight in shining armor.”

I think that is still open for debate. The odds of finding love on the internet have got to be worse than the odds of finding money in the street. I guess it happens, but not often. Silly girls.

[mystery-ak]

These 50 women could all file a class action suit for breach of contract....as far as the Army, there is nothing they can do, no crime committed....he's no officer and gentleman.....he has broken their honor code though!

[husky ed]

Didn't FOX have a T.V. show like this?

[optimistically_conservative]

A probably crime, off the top of my head, is the misuse of government property, if that was a government computer on a government internet connection he was using to read and send his emails.

Also, he can be administratively seperated for a number of non-judicial reasons based on his conduct.

[lonewacko_dot_com]

Hi Sarah. I'm sorry to hear what happened to you. I actually had something like that happen to me once in reverse, but I won't go into it. I understand what you're going through, and it seems like we're on the same wavelength, you know? It's kind of like when you only know someone a short while but it seemed that you had known them your whole life, as if there were a timeless connection between you.

As you read these words and remember those amazing feelings Sarah, it's good to know that sometimes life has a way of making us remember those things, right prior to discovering that we can experience those feelings again...

With me... in my experience, it's the kind of thing that can't be forced and no essay or words can create it. Words and appearances are only expressions, the vehicles that contain the essence that moves us. It can only happen naturally as the expression of an energy between two people, but when it does...it's just like that feeling of incredible bonding, when all the barriers melt and drop way, and two people come together, fused into one spiritual essence, the mingling of energies feeding one to the other, building and increasing and intensifying, mingling into an expression of aliveness that words can initiate but never capture fully.

It has instead to be indulged inside your own imagination...dwelled on, contemplated, experienced, deep, deep inside you. I do not know if you are the kind of person that can imagine enjoying that that kind connection, with someone wonderful who deeply moves you.

But if you could envision the possibility and feel it opening now before you, drawing you irresistibly forward, how powerfully could you feel that urge to learn more?

(Props to fastseduction.com)