I sent the video, "No Bravery" to all on my mailing list and received this reply from one who serves proudly. He was a little upset with me and those who would have kinship with the producers/message of the video. I plan to send this thread to him. Please, share your thoughts with this soldier and help him understand exactly why we want to bring him home, asap.
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If you feel kinship with the "thinkers" who contrived this nonsense, then fuck you. As you chose to send this to me, you then condone the myopic values typical of those whose "truth" derives solely from what the ever-truthful media chooses to feed them, people who are so incredibly simple-minded as to truly believe the criminal behavior of a handful of criminal soldiers is somehow representative of the rest of us serving honorably (as suggested by this piece of tripe video).
I, on the other hand, am here in the flesh living this misery, carefully observing that there are good and bad people here, same as anywhere else on the planet. I am the one dressing the "owies" of Iraqi children, handing out bottled water to them in response to their ever-persistent "hey meester, gimme this or that"; I am the one listening patiently to a very bruised and cut-up Iraqi woman complain to us about being beat nearly to death on *suspicion* of being a prostitute (she wasn't, her husband asserted vociferously). I am the one who gets to hunt down her assailants, hopefully before they target a 12-year-old girl for the same suspected crime (we didn't catch them in time...they cut up the young children of another Iraqi family who were guilty of lord-knows-what). I get to observe firsthand, quite often through the sights of my M4 as I'm making split-second life-and-death decisions, that the Iraqis who are grateful to us far outnumber those who hate us. Even then, I see and know firsthand that most of those we do arrest or kill are not Iraqis at all, but religious zealots from other Muslim countries here to live out their twisted fantasies of bringing down the "Great Satan". They fight like the cowards they are, which is to say they don't fight at all. They hide behind women and children, and then run away after wantonly deploying their weapons in our general direction, fully realizing the Catch-22 they put us in. They are most often the ones killing the women and children whose deaths the ever-truthful media spins us as guilty of.
We are careful, under threat of long-term incarceration at Ft. Leavenworth, to abide by the tenets of our Rules Of Engagement and Escalation Of Force procedures. These rules are what prevent needless deaths. We go over them verbatim every single day, before every single mission. We fill out STACKS of paperwork every time we pull the trigger, in effect setting of a criminal investigation where we get to prove the legitimacy of our use of lethal force.
The fuckwads behind the AK-47s have no such ROE/EOF they abide by. They are cowardly murderers of us and their own fellow Muslims. They are also master manipulators of a media who knowingly and deliberately misrepresent events, evidently to churn out fodder for such as cooked up this video.
So Ron, in case you didn't catch my first suggestion, go fuck yourself for being such a self-convinced mindless follower of the blind, and quit sending me this shit until you get off your ass and come over here and see this all for yourself.
Then, and only then, will your opinion about this MY war hold any weight with me.
SGT R.M.S.
Iraq
Serving proudly with honor
Fuck the rest of you sheep