Re: Beefin'

[Chap]

That same trope about young soldiers only enlisting due to economic blah blah blah also closely fits Burkett's Stolen Valor description of the Vietnam narrative of what a soldier was. More and more I think that book was not just history but also a playbook for today.

I'll be interested to see how GinMar (reservist who saw combat in Iraq, spends an enormous amount of time discussing feminist issues, fits sorta under angry left) takes this one.

RE: Where's the Beef?

[Dadmanly]

Andi, there's even a little bit more to wrinkle one's nose at, if you ask me.

Sarah at Trying to Grok links to a Newsweek/MSNBC article on a soldier’s homecoming. Sarah picks up on a highly suspect factual statement (Fabulism ala Beauchamp) hidden in the reunion piece.

Allison Samuels writes of her 24 year old cousin returning from a tour in Iraq, her family’s anxieties in her absence, and relief with her safe return home. Here’s how she introduces us to her ordeal – not her cousin’s, but Samuels:

For our family, the months of living on edge began in June 2006, when Alexia Cain was given orders to ship to Iraq. She’d enlisted in the Army months before, frustrated by the lagging job market after graduating from college. For the three years prior to that, images of fresh-faced soldiers heading off to war had been a constant on my bedroom television set. Many of the faces that flashed on the screen somehow seemed familiar in that “I-know-I’ve-seen-you-somewhere-before” way, and I prayed that those I may have known—-or didn’t—would have a safe journey there and a safe return home in mind, body and spirit.

Far be it from me to challenge the objects and particulars of a military family member’s anxieties about their loved one in combat. But as a National Guard soldier rather advanced in years myself, who deployed to Iraq with the NY Army National Guard, I know from first hand experience that many of our soldiers in Iraq are not “fresh-faced” by any means. Our average age was about 38, and while anti-war agitators and other partisans like to talk about “our boys and girls” serving in Iraq, that’s a caricature that’s not very accurate.

Be that as it may, I watched a lot of television footage on Iraq –less while I was actually mobilized and deployed – but still a fair amount. I saw many more of the “less than stereotypic” soldiers in many of these reports. I got to think that reporters often went out of their way to get footage of the overweight, and over-aged. Again, I don’t want to throw down a gauntlet or anything, but I think Samuels created that imagery for the purposes of her article.

Note too the implication that Samuels cousin joined the Army because she couldn’t get a (safer) job in the “lagging job market.” I’m kind of curious about the existence of such a job market, especially for a college graduate in a big city metropolitan area. In this article, Samuels plays correspondent on in what has the flavor of a diary entry or essay, rather than a news feature, so perhaps no need to fact check. I wonder if Samuels cousin would explain her choice to serve as out of “frustration” with her employment prospects. Just curious.

Samuels goes on to explain how difficult her cousin’s service was the family, and what happened when grim reality fell upon them:

As a family, we all knew Alexia could be sent to the war-torn region at any time, but we also prayed that some miracle would happen to change her fate and that of so many others. It just had to. But it didn’t. Our family had never sent anyone to war before, and so the ordeal of the next several months was completely alien. Some mornings I would eagerly turn on CNN as soon as I opened my eyes, to watch the latest news on the war. Other mornings I couldn’t bring myself to listen to one more word. Though NEWSWEEK regularly features articles on the war, I bypassed them in search of lighter fare. It was as if by not seeing the images, I could hold fast to my fantasy that all was right in the world and Alexia was safe and sound at her home in Atlanta, still dreaming her adolescent dreams of marrying Kobe Bryant.

Reality was, of course, much more grim. There were images of soldiers with lost limbs learning to walk again on prosthetics. I’d read reports of some female soldiers allegedly being raped by Iraqi insurgents—some 50 to 75 rapes, according to The New York Times. Alexia assured us that several male soldiers had volunteered to walk her home after she stood post at night. But that reassurance still couldn’t erase the images of assaults, bombs and corpses.

Sarah questioned this very remarkable assertion that some 50-75 female soldiers in Iraq have been raped by Iraqi insurgents. If such a report has actually appeared in print, it would be far from remarkable that it would have appeared in the NY Times. On Page One. In screaming, Pearl Harbor sized headlines.

That would be if any such report actually appeared. To my knowledge, none has.

(For the NY Times article Samuels might have been thinking of, and more commentary, stop back over at Dadmanly.)

Where's the Beef?

[Andi]

Sarah asks.

Blogs: All the noise that fits

[Soldier's Dad]

via LaTimes

The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters.

We'll Mr Reporter....I just got home from spending a week with someone who has been a News Reporter/Editor for 50 years. Someone very well respected in the journalism community.

Portraits in courage

[Lex]

All a-twitter to release a series of "gritty" and "hard hitting" anti-war movies while American forces are still engaged in combat overseas, Hollywood's Film Actors Guild once again goes boldly where angels would disdain to tread:

"Antiwar movies are coming out now because public opinion has crystallized against the war," (Brown University policy and media expert Darrell) West says.

"It's safe for Hollywood to make these kind of movies without risking much of a backlash. There's always a risk when you make an antiwar movie in the middle of the war that people are going to be ticked off," he says. "But now, with two-thirds of Americans thinking that the war in Iraq was a mistake, it's the perfect time to release these kinds of movies.

"There's been a tremendous change in American public opinion over the last two years. In 2004, Bush was re-elected based on the war on terrorism, but now the administration is seen as having mangled foreign policy and put the country into a mess. So it's safe to take on the administration in a way that it would not have been two or three years ago."

Not safe like "before we would have been bundled off to Gitmo," nor safe like "we'd have been blacklisted and never worked again," but safe like, "we can make a ton of money playing on the fears of the mall-going set while 160,000 American volunteer soldiers risk their lives in hellish conditions to preserve our freedoms." That kind of safe.

Oh, noble.

Sen. Clinton sets her mark

[CDR Salamander]

Sure, a lot of the other things she said I have issues with, but I liked this line - mostly because it must give Sen. Reid a tummy ache.

“We’ve begun to change tactics in Iraq, and in some areas, particularly in Al Anbar Province, it’s working,”

I'll take it. Just proves that when it comes to politics - she is, well, a Clinton.