Posted on 04/23/2006 12:47:26 AM PDT by Cannoneer No. 4
Patriotism and bleak demographics make the young men of Mississippi ideal cannon fodder for the war in Iraq.
[snip]
Blake Johnson is almost 18. Tan and muscular, he plays third base for the Clarkdale High School Bulldogs. He is a B student who says "Yes, sir" when his coach corrects his batting stance. Wisps of brown hair fall above his green eyes, and a rope choker is clasped around his neck. He lives in a mobile home with his mother and younger brother on Old Highway 80 on a piece of land that never quite dries.
[snip]
Military recruiters talk of Mississippi as a special place, a patriotic place and the envy of other states. The recruiting battalion commander for the Mississippi Army National Guard says his force is as large as the one in Georgia, which has triple the population. Patriotism aside, bleak demographics make the state a ready labor pool. More than 30 percent of high school students fail to graduate. The median household income - US$32,397 (HK$252,696) - ranks lowest in the nation. When the Cooper tire plant in Tupelo cuts employee hours, the Mississippi Army National Guard experiences a bump in enlistees.
[snip]
The men in his family operate cranes, install cable and lay telephone lines. His father was mostly absent from his childhood. His mother held the family together, going back to college for her degree. She now works as an IT specialist at Peavey Electronics. They live in a mobile home on about a hectare of cleared land that cost US$3,000. A house would be nice, but Diane Johnson is afraid more manufacturing work will shift to China, leaving her with a mortgage payment and no job.
[snip]
(Excerpt) Read more at thestandard.com.hk ...
Contempt is right! It durn near made my blood boil, and I'm at church at the moment.
Grrr. Ping
Thanks for the ping!
Excellent! There are a lot more jobs in the military that are necessary to support the folks who are actually doing the fighting. Logistics and maintenance are big ones. It's a big team effort to make everything work correctly.
These days I consider “California” to be San Francisco and LA with points south. Central and northern California are a different State. They should secede and form a new State.
Bumping your blog, too. ;o)
Thank you for the post.
BTTT!
Your blog is a grand slam.
I'll bet that one of those turn-coat generals the media-leftists love came from a poor state and used the military for their leg up.
To the left, the only good military men are those who attack the commander in chief.
Picked this off of your blog. It seems to me that short of forcing the press to run stories, there is little that can be done by the military. They constantly try to steer the press towards the positive stories, but the press treats anything Army Information folks says as nothing less suspect military propaganda.
Let them interview everyone in a batallion where re-ups are nearly 100% in-country, and they will quote the most outrageous statements of the one or two disgruntled pvt's as if they spoke for everyone.
What more could be done, other than trying media hacks for sedition?
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