Encouraging news

[DLeach]

Supposed to be from Special Ops guy over there. See if you like it.

Aloha







Date: Tue, 01 Jul 2003, 11:09:09 GMT







Hey Guys, sorry it's been so long since I've sent anything but a quick

note to you individually. However things have been pretty hectic

since the end of hostilities and the start of the real war. Despite

what the ???????s in the press like to say over and over: 1) We did

expect some armed resistance from the Ba'ath Party and Feydaheen; 2)

It isn't any worse than expected; 3) Things are getting better each

day, and 4) The morale of the troops is A-1, except for the normal

*****ing and griping.



My brief love affair with the press, especially the guys who had

the cajones to be embedded with the troops during the fighting, is

probably over, especially since we are back being criticized by the

same Roland Headly types that used to hang around the Palestine Hotel

drinking Baghdad Bob's whiskey and parroting his ridiculous B. S.



I'm in Baghdad now, since SpOpComm 5 relocated here from Qatar.

It looks, sounds and smells about the same but at least you can get

Maker's Mark at the local OC. We came up in mid-June to help set up

operation Scorpion and Sidewinder. It represents a major (and long

overdue) shift in tactics. Instead of being sitting ducks for the

ragheads we now are going after the worthless pieces of fecal matter.



I'm no longer baby-sitting the pukes from CNN and the canned hams

from the networks, but have a combat mission coordinating a bunch of A

teams, seeking, finding and rooting out the mostly non-Iraqis that are

well-armed, well-paid (in U. S. dollars) and always waiting to wail

for the press and then shoot some GI in the back in the midst of a

crowd. The only reason the GIs are ****** (not demoralized) is that

they cannot touch, must less waste, those taunting bags of gas that

scream in their faces and riot on cue when they spot a camera man from

ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN or NBC. If they did, then they know the next

nightly news will be about how chaotic things are and how much the

Iraqi people hate us. Some do. But the vast majority don't and

more and more see that the GIs don't start anything, are by-and-large

friendly, and very compassionate, especially to kids and old people.



I saw a bunch of 19 year-olds from the 82nd Airborne not return

fire coming from a mosque until they got a group of elderly civilians

out of harm's way. So did the Iraqis. A bunch of bad guys used a

group of women and children as human shields. The GIs surrounded

them and negotiated their surrender fifteen hours later and when they

discovered a three year-old girl had been injured by the big tough

guys throwing her down a flight of stairs, the GIs called in a MedVac

helicopter to take her and her mother to the nearest field hospital.

The Iraqis watched it all, and there hasn't been a problem in that

neighborhood since.



How many such stories, and there are hundreds of them, ever get

reported in the fair and balanced press? You know, nada. The

civilians who have figured it out faster than anyone are the local

teenagers. They watch the GIs and try to talk to them and ask

questions about America and Now wear wrap-around sunglasses, GAP

T-shirts, Dockers (or even better Levis with the red tags) and Nikes

(or Egyptian knock-offs, but with the "swoosh") and love to listen to

AFN when the GIs play it on their radios. They participate less and

less in the demonstrations and help keep us informed when a wannabe

bad-??? shows up in the neighborhood. The younger kids are going

back to school again, don't have to listen to some mullah rant about

the Koran ten hours a day, and they get a hot meal. They see the

same GIs who man the corner checkpoint, helping clear the playground,

install new swingsets and create soccer fields. I watched a bunch of

kids playing baseball in one playground, under the supervision of a

couple of GIs from Oklahoma. They weren't very good but were having

fun, probably more than most Little Leaguers The place is still a

mess but most of it has been for years.







Continued.....

 

[DLeach]

>

But the Hospitals are open and are in the process of being brought

into the 21st Century. The MOs and visiting surgeons from home are

teaching their docs new techniques and One American pharmaceutical

company (you know, the kind that all the hippies like to scream about

as greedy) donated enough medicine to stock 45 hospital pharmacies for

a year. Safe water is more available. Electricity has been

restored to pre-war levels but saboteurs keep cutting the lines. And

The old Ba'ath big shots are upset because they can't get fuel for

their private generators. One actually complained to General

McKeirnan, who told him it was a rough world.



The MPs are screening the 80,000 Iraqi police force and rehabbing

the ones that weren't goons, shake-down artists or torturers like they

did in East Berlin, Kosovo and Afghanistan. There are dual patrols

of Iraqi cops and U. S. /U. K. /Polish MPs now in most of the larger

cities. Basra has 3. 5 million inhabitants. Mosul is a city of 2

million. Kirkuk has 1 million. How many and hundreds of other small

towns have not had riots or shootings? The vast majority.



The six U. K. cops were killed in a small Shiite town by the

ex-cops they were re-habbing. According to a Royal Marine colonel I

talked to, the town now has about twenty permanent vacancies in its

police force. Mick, he's a big potato eater from Belfast named

Huggins and knows how to handle terrorists after twenty years fighting

with the IRA. He sends his regards and says he'd love to have you

here. Thinks you'd make a great police chief, even though the cops

would be more frightened of you than the local hoods (then he laughed)



I heard one doofus on MSNBC the other night talk about how "nearly

60" GIs have been killed since 01 May. The truth is that 21 GIs have

been killed in combat, mostly from ambush, from 01 May through 30

June, Another 29 have been killed by accidents or other causes (two

drowned while swimming in the Tigris). The MSNBC idiot is the same

jerk who reported on the air that "dozens of GIs" were badly burned

when two RPGs hit a truck belonging to an Engineer Battalion that was

parked by a construction site. The truck was hit and burned, three

GIs received minor injuries (including the driver who burnt his hand)

and three warriors of Allah were promptly sent to enjoy their 72 slave

girls in Paradise. Hell of a way to get laid.



A mosque in that ????hole Fallujah blew up this morning while the

local imam, a creep named Fahlil (who was one of the biggest local

loudmouths that frequently appeared on CNN) was helping a Syrian Hamas

member teach eight teenagers how to make belt bombs. Right away the

local Feyhadeen propaganda group started wailing that the Americans

hit it with a TOW missile (If they had there wouldn't have been any

mosque left!) and the usual suspects took to the streets for CNN and

BBC. One fool was dragging around a piece of tin with blood on it,

claiming it was part of the missile. The cameras rolled and the

idiot started repeating his story, then one of my guys asked him in

Arabic where he had left the rag he usually wore around his face that

made him look like a girl. He was a local leader of the Feyhadeen.

We took the clown in custody and were asked rather indignantly by the

twit from BBC if we were trying to shut up "the poor man who had seen

his mosque and friends blown up. " I told the airy-fairy who the

raghead was and if he knew Arabic (which he obviously didn't) he'd

know he was a Palestinian. I suggested we take him down to the local

jail and we'd lock him and his cameraman in a cell with the "poor man"

and they could interview him until we took him to headquarters. They

declined the invitation.



Guess what played on the Bull???? Broadcasting System that

evening? Did the Americans blow up a mosque? See the poor man who is

still in a state of shock over losing his mosque and relatives? Yep.

Our friend the Palestinian. Our search and destroy missions are

largely at night, free of reporters and generally terrifying to those

brave warriors of Allah. The only thing that frightens them more is

hearing the word "Gitmo". The word is out that a trip to Guantanimo

Bay is not a Caribbean vacation and they usually start squealing like

the little mice they are, when an interrogator mentions "Gitmo". No

wonder the International Red Cross, the National Council of Churches

and the French keep protesting about the place. They know it has

proven to be very effective in keeping several hundred real fanatical

psychopaths in check and very frankly would rather see them cut loose

to go kill some more GIs or innocent Americans, just to make W. look

bad.



>

We have about 200 really bad guys in custody now and probably will

park them in the desert behind a triple roll of razor wire, backed up

by a couple of Bradleys pointed their way, if they decide to riot.

Maybe a few will get to Gitmo but most are human garbage that

wouldn't take on your five-year old grandson face-to-face. The more

we go after them and not vice-versa I think we will see the sniper

attacks go down. Yeah, they'll get lucky now and then, but it's

showtime, fellows. Our first objective is to get the die-hards off

the street (or make them too scared to come out in them) and destroy

their caches of weapons (we have collected more than 227,000 A-47s and

that is only the tip of the iceburg; Curly bought nearly a million of

them from our pal Vladimir), then cut off their money supply, mostly

from Syria and Lebanon.



We must continue to get public services up and running, so the

local families can get water, sewage and garbage service; electricity,

public transportation; oil fields and refineries working and a dinar

that won't halve in value every month. It's going to be a long haul

(remember it took 10-15 years in Japan and West Germany) but if we

don't stick with it, nobody else will, and we'll have some other

looney running the place again. This place has greater potential

than Saudi Arabia (bunch of goat-herders who struck black gold) or

Iran (weird dudes who can't run a rug bazaar much less a major country).



I keep telling myself even the Democrats can't be that

self-destructive. But then I look at the current line-up. The

cream of the crap. If that lying ***** ever gets elected we're

really in trouble. By we, I mean the whole world. She'll slide

just plain Bill in as the Secretary-General of the U. N. and then the

whole world will be trying to take our great country ... the greatest

ever (and that's coming from an ex-Canuck) ... down and civilization

with it. Armageddon, here we come. Remember, it's located on the

outskirts of Jerusalem. Enough of that cheery speculation.



The good news is that General Schoonmaker is going to appointed

ChiefArmy and the old man is coming to Tampa to run the SpOps desk at

CentComm. He's tops and will be getting his second star. To me it

means that SpOps will be more predominant in future operations and

after 18 years as a GB maybe I'll have a shot at a bird-level combat

command. The old man asked me to come to MacDill and be his ACS but

I told him after I spent four months changing the diapers of the media

types, I wanted to go back to action. Hence, my current gig. As

the movie quoted old General Patton, "God help me, I love it. " I do.

Nothing more satisfying than working with the BEST damn soldiers in

the world, flushing real human poop down the drain and giving some

folks a chance at trying freedom for a change. They may learn to

like it and then my great-great-grandson won't have to worry about

some maniac trying to destroy the planet.



My tour is over at the end of August, and I plan to return to

Tampa, brief the old man, then head to San Rafael and see my two

sweethearts. I'd like to visit my parents in Toronto and my brother

in London, before taking on a trip across the country. Just like any

other family. It will charge my batteries before I end up back in

some other interesting and challenging location. I hope to see most

of you and ask for some advice, not support. I know I've had that all

along. Thanks. Now about that Maker's Mark.



God Bless America