The New Republic and "Scott Thomas."

I've not been ignoring this story, though, admittedly, I've been busy.

Besides, others, with better sources and more time, have covered it already. We'll get to them in a moment.

The real horror here is how the media and the medium shape the perception. Just as Oliver Stone's movie, "Platoon" and Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket" defined what many people perceived as the experience (and values) of all soldiers in Vietnam, where everything bad that ever happened happens to a single platoon in two hours, so, too, the writings of "Scott Thomas" have the potential to be the next "Winter Soldiers" type of generational smear, where (if we accept them at face value) the scattered incidents of bizarre behavior morph into the face of a generation of soldiers in the popular imagination.

I don't think that's as likely to happen here - the media, thanks to the Internet is much more varied and diverse, and there are many many voices out there pointing out how things are different from those portrayals.

But the "Scott Thomas" stuff reads like the fevered imaginings of someone who really really really wants it to be true, because it fits the filter they want to see the world through.

But there are things throughout the "Scott Thomas" stuff that fall like lead weights on my experience... but others have covered those:

Like the Democracy Project on the "Chasing Dogs with Bradleys" assertion.

Cassandra, at Villainous Company, runs with the Winter Soldier Redux meme - and I gotta tell ya, the whole "melted face" thing just rings so false in my ear from how I've seen soldiers treat fellow soldiers with horrific wounds. And I've spent time amongst wounded soldiers, both as a kid, when I spent a week on an amputee ward at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, and later through my military career.

I've heard carp like that (or read about it in aviator memoirs of WWII pilots who were hideously burned) from... *civilians* with no experience of war, but never a soldier. Not saying it can't happen, or hasn't happened - just that it isn't very likely to happen. And the perpetrator is likely to find themselves a casualty of "barracks justice" in the form of a blanket party or worse.

Then there's the New Republic itself.

Bob Owens of Confederate Yankee, with his "Two questions for the New Republic."

My contribution to this is simple. I went to my bookshelf. The 30 linear feet or so of reference material I have on firearms and ammunition.

And tried to figure out "square-backed" 9mm ammunition - and how that related to Glock pistols. Because that's who "Scott Thomas" decided that a massacre scene he happened upon had to have been perpetrated by Iraqi police. "Square-backed" 9mm shell-casings that are unique to Glock pistols, which, according to "Thomas," only the Iraqi police carry.

I know of two total types of ammo in which the word "square" could be applied (leaving aside "square weight" as used for separate loading artillery ammunition).

The Puckle Gun, an early flintlock attempt at a Gatling-style mechanical machine gun, which proposed round bullets for use against Christian troops and square bullets for use against the Ottoman Turks. No casings here, just bullets.

The second is the experimental Heckler and Koch G11 Advanced Combat Rifle, which used a revolutionary (and ultimately unsuccessful) caseless round which was... square in cross-section - but, being caseless, didn't eject a... casing, square-backed or otherwise.

People are still working on the concept - though the tendency is to go for round casings - oddly enough, square caseless rounds, because they have corners, have a tendency to get damaged along the corner edges. See a 2005 brief on DoD caseless ammo efforts here.

There are lots of reasons, ease of loading and handling, as well as the physics of barrels and chambers, that bullets and their casings are... round, vice square, except for the exotics like the G11.

So, perhaps "Thomas" meant a different feature.

Primers? Nope. No square primers. Makes assembling the cartridge a pain.

Perhaps the rim and extractor groove? The SAAMI-standard 9mm round (for which Glock chambers it's barrels and designs its extractors) has an extractor groove which is square to the base, but has a slope from the edge of the casing body to the bottom of the extractor groove.

Such as these examples at Cartridge Collectors. None of my references anywhere - and I've got current books on all the ammo being made in the world today and most of the obsolete ammo - show anything that might be construed as "square-backed" ammo.

That leaves headstamp markings. There are some headstamps that incorporate a square. But one wouldn't naturally refer to those as "square-backed" - at least not anyone I've ever talked to, like a soldier, who has a passing familiarity with ammunition.

Just sayin'.

Update: The subject continues in the comments - worth reading.