H&I* Fires, 11 FEB 2007

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This is a hoot! H/t, SWWBO.

Here's a good read: Jonathan Gurwitz in the San Antonio Express-News: Homefront ingrates turning on American troops.

There is inherent tension in the concept of opposing the war in Iraq but supporting the troops. So it was perhaps inevitable that some people who despise the war would begin to turn on the men and women fighting it.

Many people can maintain the distinction. But as the ugliness of the criticism increases, it becomes more difficult to separate the men from the mission. After all, the men and women fighting in Iraq and elsewhere in the global war on terror tend to be — despite all the hardships placed upon them and their families — the most ardent supporters of completing the mission.

Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein breached the wall between opposing the war and supporting the troops last year. "When you volunteer for the U.S. military, you pretty much know you're not going to be fending off invasions from Mexico and Canada . So you're willingly signing up to be a fighting tool of American imperialism," he wrote in a column titled "Warriors and Wusses."

"I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War," Stein added, "but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea."

Last week, Washington Post columnist William Arkin thoroughly demolished the wall.

I know, old news - but hey, it's still a good read, and since Mr. Arkin thinks we're all troglogdytes anyway, what's to lose? Read the rest here. H/t, Mike D.

Mike also posts this poser:

While all of the accolades John Burns receives as the only rational member of the NYT’s bylined reporters are probably well deserved, the following really makes this doofus question the methodology of said accolades. My only problem with Hugh’s question is his not referring to Michael Totten as well.

HH: Are you aware of the work of Michael Yon and Bill Roggio?

JB: I’m not. Tell me about them.

Read the whole thing here. -the Armorer

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Well blow me down with the rotorwash... we're going to have a new Medal of Honor holder - who will get the Medal himself, and not his surviving next of kin. Retired LTC Bruce Crandall - who most of you might better remember as the helo commander who inserted and evac'd LTC Moore's troops in the Ia Drang Valley. A fight immortalized in the book We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, and the movie, We Were Soldiers.

Well done, Colonel. It's about time. Read about it over at Dumb Ox Daily News.

Oh, and this is the place I get to tell you I'll be hearing Joe Galloway speak next month. And getting my copy of We Were Soldiers Once, and Young, autographed. Ppplllllpptttt! That said - I'd be willing to take a few more copies with me to get signed - drop me a line if you'd like me to do that for you. [crossing fingers that 30 or more don't take me up on the offer - that would be embarrassing] -the Armorer

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Joe Galloway! Tell him all o' us "God's Own Lunatics" still treasure him for that phrase. That speech he gave at The Wall in July 2000 was worth more to us than all the medals ever cast...

Is there anyone here today who does not thrill to the sound of those Huey blades? That familiar whop-whop-whop is the soundtrack of our war, the lullaby of our younger days.

To someone who spent his time in Nam with the Grunts, I have got to tell you that noise was always a great comfort. It meant someone was coming to help . . . someone was coming to get our wounded . . . someone was coming to bring us water and ammo . . . someone was coming to take our dead brothers home . . . someone was coming to give us a ride out of hell. Even when I hear it today, I stop, catch my breath, and think back to those days.

I love you guys as only an Infantryman can love you. No matter how bad things were, if we called, you came. Down through the green tracers and other visible signs of a real bad day off to a bad start.

I would like to quote to you from a letter General William Tecumseh Sherman wrote his friend General Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War. "I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if I got in a tight place you would come, if alive."

That was always in our minds and that is how we thought of you. To us you seemed beyond brave and fearless, that you would come to us in the middle of battle in those flimsy thin-skinned crates, and in the storm of fire you would sit up there behind that Plexiglas seeming so patient and so calm and so vulnerable, waiting for the off-loading and the on-loading. We thought you were God's own lunatics, and we loved you.

Still do.

We are gathered here this morning to appreciate the lives and honor the memory of 2,209 helicopter pilots and 2,704 helicopter crewmen who were killed while doing their duty in the Republic of Vietnam between May 30, 1961 and May 15, 1975. Theirs are some of the names among the 58,220 on this precious Wall. So many good men, so many good friends.

Before I come here, I always remind myself of what another good friend, Captain B.T. Collins, who is now gone, liked to say at gatherings like this. "No whining and no crying! We are the fortunate ones! We survived when so many better men gave up their precious lives for us. We owe them a sacred debt, to live each day to the fullest, trying to make this world a better place for our having lived and their having died."

So we come here today to remember them, and to celebrate their lives and their deeds. I like to come here at dawn, or around midnight, when things are so quiet you can hear their voices. What they are saying when you listen hard enough is this: We are at peace . . . so should you be . . . so should you be.

I would like to close by reading from something written by a World War I poet named Lawrence Binyon:

"They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old.
Age shall not wear them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun, and in the morning,
We will remember them."

God bless all our absent friends . . . and God Bless you.

And God Bless Joe Galloway. --BillT