Maj. Gen. Odierno Videoteleconference from Baghdad [4th ID ~ Our troops rock!]

One of the sad things about this media attitude is that it robs our generation of the legitimate pride they could take in US successes in Iraq.

That is so true. We learned a few things from Vietnam. Americans finally thanked our Vietnam Vets and these Veterans then reached out to and welcomed home the younger Iraqi troops - awesome.

The press did it once before. We didn't have the internet then.

Excerpts from Stolen Valor: How The Vietnam Generation Was Robbed Of its Heroes And its History by B.G. Burkett & Glenna Whitley :

* Part I - Rambo and the Bogus War Heroes
* Part II - Welcome Home, Babykiller
* Part III - Will the Real Vietnam Vet Stand Up?
* Part VI - The VVA - The Vietnam Victims of America

Comments from family with loved ones serving are powerful, m-a. There is no one more concerned with the truth, and the safety of our troops:

"BL, I'm sure you have some homeboys knocking around Central Iraq, what are you hearing?"

That they want more cookies and snacks ... more CARE packages. Other than that, little else. They aren't even complaining about the heat, as it's not that much different than here at Fort Hood.

As always, soldiers raise the art of griping and complaining to a fine art. So it's hard for someone who has not been in the military to differentiate between normal grousing and b*tching and honest heartfelt complaints that actually refer to a problem. But the guys I've been "hanging out" with from 4ID, the 82nd, and the 101st .. (I don't know anyone in the 3rd ID) .. haven't said anything serious yet in regards to complaints about the situation there.

Also, anyone who makes an "anonymous" complaint deserves the derision that results. If someone .. particularly an NCO or an officer .. isn't willing to tie their name and reputation to an official complaint, then what they're complaining about ain't serious enough and they've simply shown themselves to be moral cowards.

54 posted on 06/03/2003 12:44 PM EDT by BlueLancer (Der Elite Møøsenspåånkængruppen ØberKømmååndø (EMØØK))

I have to agree...no complaints from my hubby or his men....he just wants more baby powder and foot cream....when he called Sunday night he told me that there hasn't been a day where a Kuwaiti or Iraqi hasn't thanked him and the US for what they are doing...he is proud to be a part of the liberation of Iraq.

61 posted on 06/03/2003 12:56 PM EDT by mystery-ak (The War is not over for me until my hubby's boots hit U.S. soil.)

Thank you, m-a...for your sacrifice, your hubby and son.

You might enjoy this - Mark Steyn nails the NGOs and the press for misreporting (and America-bashing):

Mark Steyn: Others can do the caring
The Spectator (U.K.) ^ | 06/21/03 | Mark Steyn

~~~
After I wrote about my trip to Iraq in the Sunday Telegraph and its sister papers, I received quite a few emails from US troops in the country, the gist of which was summed up by one guy with a civil affairs unit near Baghdad: ‘I’m glad to hear somebody report what’s really going on ...the fact that there isn’t anything going on.’ I saw no anarchy, no significant anti-US hostility, and no hospitals at anything like capacity. In other words, I was unable to find Will Day’s Iraq. I don’t honestly think it exists outside his head: as Dinah Washington once sang, ‘Water difference a Day makes’; he has miraculously transformed Iraqi water into whine.

~~~

In October 2001 Faizul-Aqtab Siddiqi, president-general of the International Muslim Organisation, said bombing Afghanistan would create a thousand bin Ladens. It didn’t. In March this year President Mubarak of Egypt said bombing Iraq would create a hundred bin Ladens. So right there you’ve got a tenfold decrease in the bin Laden creation programme. But even that modest revised target wasn’t met. There’s widespread starvation and disease and millions of refugees in Iraq. Except there aren’t. The Baghdad Museum was looted of its treasures. Only it wasn’t.

What all these fictions have in common is the prejudice behind them: the article of blind faith that the Americans are blundering idiots who know nothing of the world. It was this that led Robert Fisk, whom my colleague Stephen Glover regards as a ‘genius’, to suggest in print that when the Yanks claimed to be at Baghdad International Airport they’d in fact wandered by accident on to an abandoned RAF airfield many miles away. Nobody who knows anything about a modern military or even the kind of GPS technology that Chevrolet now include in their mid-price trucks and SUVs would say anything so stupid in print — unless he were so blinded by irrational Yankophobia that he was impervious to anything so prosaic as reality.

~~~
If the overriding issue for M. Parris is American hegemony, the issue for me is the rise of transnational neo-imperialism. I’d rather take my chances with nation-states and great power politics than submit to ‘international law’. I think Nato and the UN Security Council need ‘damaging’, and so does America’s relationship with ‘Europe’. And the jet-set humanitarians, as represented by Will Day, might also benefit from being forced to rethink their act. There is, of course, a real humanitarian crisis in the world today — in the Congo, an environment blessedly free of blundering Yanks, where ‘international law’ has ridden to the rescue and, as in the Balkans and elsewhere, the UN is providing the usual genteel multilateral cover for ethnic slaughter. But, because it doesn’t accord with the New Universal Theory of Texan-Zionist neocon aggression, nobody cares.

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