Posted on 05/30/2004 10:20:27 AM PDT by quidnunc
When Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion of the 5th Marine Regiment led U.S. forces into the heart of Fallujah in the pre-dawn hours of April 6, I was the only journalist present. It had been Bravo Company of the "1st of the 5th" that had been first inside the citadel of Hue in Vietnam in February 1968. Hue City, the sight of one of the most glorious chapters in Marine history — in which the Marines killed 5,113 enemy troops while suffering 147 dead and 857 wounded — was foremost in the minds of the Marine commanders at Fallujah.
The Marines never got proper credit for Hue, for it was ultimately overshadowed by My Lai, in which an Army platoon killed 347 civilians a month later in 1968. This was despite the fact that the Marines' liberation of Hue led to the uncovering of thousands of mass graves there: the victims of an indiscriminate communist slaughter. Thus, Hue became a metaphor for the military's frustration with the media: a frustration revisited in Fallujah.
Whenever the Marines with whom I was attached crossed the path of a mosque, we were fired upon. Mosques in Fallujah were used by snipers and other gunmen, and to store weapons and explosives. Time and again the insurgents forfeited the protective status granted these religious structures as stipulated by Geneva Conventions. Snipers were a particular concern. In early April in nearby Ramadi, an enemy sniper wiped out a squad of Marines using a Soviet-designed Draganov rifle: "12 shots, 12 kills," a Marine officer told me. The marksmanship indicated either imported jihadist talent or a member of the old regime's military elite.
By the standards of most wars, some mosques in Fallujah deserved to be leveled. But only after repeated aggressions was any mosque targeted, and then sometimes for hits so small in scope that they often had little effect. The news photos of holes in mosque domes did not indicate the callousness of the American military; rather the reverse.
As for the close-quarters urban combat, I was in the city the first days of the battle. The overwhelming percentage of the small arms fire — not-to-mention mortars, rockets, and RPGs — represented indiscriminate automatic bursts of the insurgents. Marines responded with far fewer, more precise shots. It was inspiring to observe high-testosterone 19-year-old lance corporals turn into calm and calculating 30-year-olds every time a firefight started.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at urbanonramps.com ...
"an enemy sniper wiped out a squad of Marines using a Soviet-designed Draganov rifle"
May God bless and keep our fallen heroes...
...and grant this terrorist scum the reward they so richly deserve -- in hell.
PDFs are nice sometimes.
God bless our heroes.
bump
Eh. PDF always crashes my browser. Always.
read later
Can't you expand your PDF window?
You should be able to adjust the size of the text so you can read it easily and expand the window so it doesn't cut of any words.
The people who served in Vietnam were trashed by a partisan press. Their heroics were ignored and slandere. The press got away with it.
The media is in full treason mode in Iraq---but the truth is coming out. History will not be so easily distorted again.
Do you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer?
You need it in order to open a PDF.
If you don't have it it's a free download.
Yes, page 2 of that Adobe Acrobat file is not totally readable.
you have to hit the maximimize button
I just loathe those vermins....
GOD bless our troops and their Commander in Chief, may HE give them Divine wisdom & Revelation to expertly destroy the enemies of freedom.
"Makes me seriously wonder if the media had been sitting on these pictures for some time waiting for the right moment to run the story."
I have almost no doubt you are correct. The Abu Ghraib story was out there months ago, maybe the photos weren't leaked until later, but if the media had any interest in it, they could have followed it up a while ago.
Beat Bush, that is their only goal, their credo. They don't care if that means the rest of us have to die at the hands of Islamofacists, they are too stupid to realize it means they may die at the hands of islamofacists.
The left cares nothing for anything save one thing, abortion on demand. They forget, the islamofacists will never permit that.
The left must be crushed in November. The voters need to have another "temper tantrum" and put Jennings, et al. in their place.
Lordy you are a slow learner....at least you finally came around
A heads-up: From what I read on an earlier post about this article, a much longer version of this article will appear in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.
I get files not responding, like acord32 or whatever it is, some hidden servers and such as well. (To see these you have to hit ctrl alt del and look at all the running processes - there is nothing on the screen but a hung browser). If I try multiple times I get multiple hung copies of these running in the background.
PDF does not play well with browsers. I hate it when people treat it as an internet compatible standard. It isn't. It is meant for printing things out. On the web, use HTML. That's what the bleeding language is for. If Adobe wants to fix their program so that it actually works with windows, gee wouldn't that be nice?
You have my symapthies, I have a Mac so I don't have those problems.
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