Mel Gibson
Listening to the raging Mel Gibson as he freaked out and sounded so pathetic and confused and defiitely betrayed, it really makes me sad for everyone. The woman who he is threatening and with whom he has had a baby with and him, Mel Gibson, someone who has acconplished so much in his career. He appears to be a fine actor and Director who obviously has so much energy and talent, grief and mental anguish that has to be causing deep psychological wounds.
May he use his head more before he blows his top and creates such a scene. Professional help is obviously warranted.
MY WAR In PICTURES
Operation TRUTH Pictures
Casey Culler, from Mt. Airy, NC, served in the Army in Afghanistan from August 2002 to January 2003, and in Iraq from September 2003 to March 2004. Here are some of his photos from his deployments.
"My first deployment was to Afghanistan in August of 2002. While there we did various duties to include; QRF from Baghram, safe-house security near Khost, combat patrols and missions from Khost and we worked out of Jacobabad Pakistan for a while with the Air Force.
I was in country for about 7 months and saw the better part of the country, from the mountains of Baghram to the desert of Kandahar to the border of Pakistan near Khost and Skhin.
This photo is of a mission we on near Khost Afghanistan. Khost is a border town near the Pakistan. We did a lot of searching in that area for caches and bad guys.
The "safehouses are used by the Special Forces. We were the primary security for the base and in the background you see a bunker. I am holding a round from a confiscated 75mm recoilless rifle, we added it to our defenses.
For Thanksgiving the Special Forces guys had bought 9 turkeys on the local economy and had a oven built to cook them with, we fed them and turkey-day morning we killed and cleaned them. Man they were good!!! I never will forget that Thanksgiving!
This is when we were headed out of the Khost region to go back to Kandahar and the trip home. We were so happy, finally it was almost over...That morning a suicide bicyclist ran into the gate and blew himself up.
My second deployment was to Iraq in September of 2002. While in Iraq we moved into a place that used to be used to train Iranian terrorist (Mujahedin-e Kalq.) This was in what is now called Camp Fallujah by the Marines I think. It is at the bottom of the "Sunni triangle" just outside Al Fallujah. From there we ran combat patrols and missions all over the sector. We didn't move around as much as we had in Afghanistan, but did we ever stay busy! As a mortar base gunner/team leader I was used in many roles from the Commander and 1st Sgt.'s drivers and escorts to a regular fire team. I convoyed up to Fallujah from Kuwait and saw the better part of southern part of the country and central Iraq through the missions.
We worked a lot in this town on the outskirts of Fallujah, it was called Nasir-Wel-Al-Salam (excuse the spelling) We would go there 4-6 times a week and sometimes spend all day in the streets with the locals. There were many kids that loved to hang out with us. Some were good, some were bad, one kids actually pointed out a IED one day, we thanked him and gave him tons of candy. He probably saved someones life that day. We loved to give the kids candy and pens.
This is a picture of me and the family of a girl I "adopted." She is in the yellow shirt, the rest are her siblings. I gave her almost all my candy and pens. I thought she was so adorable. I gave her Scooby-Doo doll my wife had sent to me for my birthday even. If I could have adopted her and brought her home I would have. To give her something better than Iraq, I miss seeing her cute smile.
Most of our missions were in either darkness or very early morning hours. This day was no different, we left and got into position during the night and hit the houses at dawn. It was very cold during this time of my tour in Iraq.
Notice the mud, this is during the rain season. We used to fire rounds near some of the areas we were assaulting just to let them know we meant business. They responded well to that, they didn't want nothing to do with the business end of my mortar.
Local people who worked with us ended up dead. This was a fairly normal occurrence, we were on the way to Nasir.... And we found this guy in the middle of our trails. He was shot execution style in the back of his head. He worked with the Army to help us find the bad guys. This is why a lot of the locals are scared to talk or help us.
One of the problems we had with the locals was looting. They would steal anything not nailed down, and then some. We gave them fair warnings but after a few of them we let their horses go and burned their cars and trucks. They would steal the concrete mix, steel rebar, and anything else. They were known to even kill the Iraqi guards in doing so.
Ginmar's Iraq LitBlog
LitBlogs:
"
'Ginmar', a soldier serving in Iraq, is profane, witty, and profound by turns, sometimes all at once. She's an unrepentant, uncompromising, unapologetic feminist, and proud of it. She rants, raves, sputters, snarls, snipes, and shivs many of her posts; she does not suffer fools gladly. Or at all. Instead, she makes them suffer, and is it ever fun to watch her do it. "
One example:
After a very funny takedown, she shifts gears.
Websense is...like some kind of Puritan standing guard at the whorehouse door, charging admission and clucking disapprovingly, except here they don't ever let you in, and you've already paid the price
because you're in Iraq already.
Once again, I'm reminded of the unique status of the citizen soldier: we represent our country, and defend it, and it's moments like this that make me wonder what exactly we're getting in return.
We have to have our websites screened because we're so easily influenced we might be led in some way that others might disapprove of---yet they trust us to shape a nation.
Half the soldiers here are
Reservists, which means they're used to non-military environments and other perspectives. We represent America more realistically than our very own Congress does:
there are more women in the military---hell, in the Marines----than there are Congress----and yet we must be clucked and nannied as if we were children.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. - You cannot trust us in part when you ask us for everything in return. We are not just a means to an end here, but an end in and of ourselves. At the most intimate basic level, all this handholding means that somewhere, somehow....we are not trusted by the very people who ask us to lay down our lives for their principles.
I have to wonder what else is going to happen.
Dammit, I hate it when I start bitching and turn serious.
I'm going to bed.....
(Continued)
MiBlog from IRAQ
A Labrats Journey
This is basically the WebLog of Beth, a 27 year old Navy Corpsman as she starts her journey to Iraq, leaving her son and husband 7000 miles away! I am an E-5 in the USN, a Hospital Corpsman, and laboratory technician. I am married and have one son.
Disclaimer: The thoughts, views, pictures, comments expressed in no way represent the Views of US Navy, Marines, Department of Defense,or anyone other than myself!(unless otherwise stated) I am not here to offend anyone.
Mick Arran's follow up to CBFTW
LitBlogs: Update: My War, Over and Out
The lesson wasn't learned in Vietnam.....In the end, the military, particularly the Army, was blamed for both its own mistakes and the mistakes of its civilian commanders, and the way they saw it, it was the press that was doing the blaming.
They reacted at first by over-reacting: they began to shut the press out entirely. During the First Gulf War, they controlled the press with an iron fist. No reporter was allowed to go anywhere near the actual fighting; most were ordered into far-away enclaves--hotels in Kuwait and Cairo--where they were totally dependent on military press officers for information. No tv, no radio, no photographers. The shut-down worked so well that it was years before we even heard about the Highway of Death much less saw pictures of it.
The Army had used silence and secrecy to rehabilitate its reputation. It liked the result.
During the invasion of Iraq, it was so confident in its ability to control the press that it allowed some reporters to ride with certain selected units, 'embedded' with them. It was a brilliant strategy. Not only could they control everything the 'embeds' saw or heard, but the embeds began to identify themselves with the units with which they rode, becoming cheerleaders rather than reporters.
Then the Army set up CentCom with the help of
Republican PR strategist and dirty-tricks specialist Jim Wilkenson, a Hollywood-style set faked to look like a military HQ but miles from the action, and herded the giant press corps into it like cows, feeding them pre-digested pap that everybody had to pretend was 'information'.
The results must have been beyond their wildest expectations--glowing reports filled the nation's tv screens, the military was all but worshipped, dissenters and questioners were--and still are--shouted down with calls of 'Traitor!', often accompanied by vocal and colorfully detailed threats.
In other words, they learned that absolute control works. The Viet Nam lesson was, "Show them only what you want them to see and prevent them at all costs from seeing anything else.' It is a dictum they have lived by in the years since and it has served them well.
It is not too much to infer that that strict control has been or is being extended to soldier-blogs like C's. Until the plug got pulled on
My War, it frankly never occurred to me that anyone would care what he wrote as long as he wasn't doing dumb things like giving away their position or plans in advance, which he wasn't. He's a smart kid, and he was always careful to include only general information that the enemy would already know or personal details that would be of no interest or value to them.
But I was wrong. They did care. It wasn't the comments and it wasn't that he was giving away military secrets, which he wasn't.
It was the potential notoriety and, more importantly, the possibility that C might say something that wasn't completely flattering to the military, the president, his commanders or those who commanded them.
(See link for more)
MY WAR - by CBFTW - Hell On Earth - IRAQ (Please read!)
MY WAR
Blogs offer view of soldiers' lives
By Ellen Simon - The Associated Press
Spc. Colby Buzzell's squad was on a mission in a poor neighborhood in Mosul when two Iraqi boys ran up carrying old artillery shells. "Give me dollar!" they said.
Another came carrying bullets and demanding money.
"Then, all of a sudden, this really skinny Iraqi kid comes running up to us with a ... HAND GRENADE in his hand," Buzzell wrote on his war blog.
"'Drop the ... hand grenade! Drop it now!' We all started yelling. The little kid, still with this proud smile on his face that said, 'Look what I just found' just dropped the grenade on the ground, and walked over to my squad leader and said, 'Give me money!'
"The grenade didn't go off.
The squad leader explained to his men that an Army division that had been in the area earlier had paid children for weapons or unexploded ordnance...
(Follow the link for more)
Following links to MiBlogs - PLEASE READ THEM
Whoever may see this......
I linked to various Military Blogs because they have a very important story to tell: "The war was -is- and always will be --- A Mistake."
Read these sad stories and ask yourself, "Was it worth it?" Is all the suffering worth it?
NO. Damn it. Damn the leaders who dragged us into this mess.
May they forever rot in hell.
Short Joke: E-Mail Insanity
An example of the E-Mail Insanity.....
I was on my way to the post office to pick up my case of free M&M's (sent to me because I forwarded an e-mail to five other people celebrating the fact that the year 2000 is "MM" in Roman numerals) when I ran into a friend whose neighbor, a young man, was home recovering from having been served a rat in his bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (which is predictable since, as everyone knows, there's no actual chicken in Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is why the government made them change their name to KFC).
Anyway, one day this guy went to sleep and when he awoke he was in his bathtub and it was full of ice and he was sore all over; and when he got out of the tub, he realized that HIS KIDNEY HAD BEEN STOLEN. He saw a note on his mirror that said "Call 911!" but he was afraid to use his phone because it was connected to his computer and there was a virus on his computer that would destroy his hard drive if he opened an e-mail entitled "Join the crew!"
He knew it wasn't a hoax because he himself was a computer programmer who was working on software to prevent a global disaster in which all the computers get together and distribute the $250.00 Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe under the leadership of Bill Gates. (It's true - I read it all last week in a mass e-mail from BILL GATES HIMSELF who was also promising me a free Disney World vacation and $5,000 if I would forward the e-mail to everyone I know.)
The poor man then tried to call 911 from a pay phone to report his missing kidney but a voice on the line first asked him to press #90 which unwittingly gave a bandit full access to the phone line at the guy's expense. Then reaching into the coin-return slot, he got jabbed with an HIV-infected needle around which was wrapped a note the at said, "Welcome to the world of AIDS." Luckily he was only a few blocks from the hospital - the one where the last wish of that little boy who is dying of cancer is for everyone in the world to send him an e-mail and the American Cancer Society has agreed to pay him a nickel for every e-mail he receives. I sent him two e-mails and one of them was a bunch of x's and o's in the shape of an angel (if you get it and forward it to more than 10 people, you will have good luck but for 10 people only you will only have OK luck and if you send it to fewer than 10 people you will have BAD LUCK FOR SEVEN YEARS).
So anyway, the poor guy tried to drive himself to the hospital; but on the way, he noticed another car driving without its lights on. To be helpful, he flashed his lights at him and was promptly shot as part of a gang initiation.
THEN you have to "Send THIS to all the friends who send you their junk mail and you will receive 4 green M&Ms -- if you don't, the owner of Proctor and Gamble will report you to his Satanist friends and you will have more bad luck: you will get sick from the Sodium Laureth Sulfate in your shampoo, your spouse/mate will develop a skin rash from using the antiperspirant which clogs the pores under your arms, you will get deathly sick from not wiping soda cans with soap and water before drinking from them, and even if you do clean the can top carefully, the aspartame in the soda will give you multiple sclerosis"... and the U.S. government will put a tax on your e-mails forever.
I know this is all true 'cause I read it on the Internet!
--------------------Gimme a break!!!!!
