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The Taliban murdered a couple of female civilian aid workers in Kandahar last week, and subsequently released an open letter to Canadians threatening more such action if our soldiers aren't withdrawn from Afghanistan.
One of those soldiers, Col George Petrolekas, has responded with a letter of his own:
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August 21, 1863. "Who'll ride with me to Mt. Oread boys?" The Sack of Lawrence by Quantrill and his band of ruffians - both sides were right bastards during the war in this part of the country, starting back in the days of Bleeding Kansas. Oddly enough, even though I'm a Yankee, and a Redleg, as a Mizzou grad, a sack of Mt. Oread appeals... if only on the fields of friendly strife. H/t, a rather persistent Kevin. -the Armorer
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In other Civil War news... we're still losing family members of Civil War veterans. Meet Ms. Maudie White Hopkins.:
With another tip of the hat to Kevin. -the Armorer
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The Taliban murdered a couple of female civilian aid workers in Kandahar last week, and subsequently released an open letter to Canadians threatening more such action if our soldiers aren't withdrawn from Afghanistan.
One of those soldiers, Col George Petrolekas, has responded with a letter of his own:
You purport to speak for Afghans and Afghanistan yet your only questionable legitimacy comes from the barrel of a gun, the slaughter and intimidation of innocents supported by the profits of the opium crop that you protect. You do not answer for the night letters you send, the people you behead, or the villages you hold hostage whose only crime is that they do not agree with your views.It only gets better from there. Do yourself a favour and read the whole thing. - Damian
And yet you dare say that we come to kill your innocent, equally forgetting the deaths of thousands of innocents committed by your fellow travellers in crime; so conveniently forgetting the slaughters of Bali, Madrid, London and New York City. Your words may sound high and mighty, but your actions and deeds betray the truth of what you are: a movement committed to the enslavement and servitude of those whose voices cannot be heard. You revile America forgetting that it gave you more food, flour and wheat than any other nation while you were in power; what did you do for the Afghan people?
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August 21, 1863. "Who'll ride with me to Mt. Oread boys?" The Sack of Lawrence by Quantrill and his band of ruffians - both sides were right bastards during the war in this part of the country, starting back in the days of Bleeding Kansas. Oddly enough, even though I'm a Yankee, and a Redleg, as a Mizzou grad, a sack of Mt. Oread appeals... if only on the fields of friendly strife. H/t, a rather persistent Kevin. -the Armorer
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In other Civil War news... we're still losing family members of Civil War veterans. Meet Ms. Maudie White Hopkins.:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) _ Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93.
Hopkins, the mother of three children from a second marriage who loved to make fried peach pies and applesauce cakes, died Sunday at a hospital in Helena-West Helena, said Rodger Hooker of the Roller-Citizens Funeral Home.
Other Confederate widows are still living, but they don't want any publicity, Martha Boltz of the United Daughters of the Confederacy said Tuesday.
With another tip of the hat to Kevin. -the Armorer
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*A term of art from the artillery. Harassment and Interdiction Fires. Back in the day, when you could just kill people and break things without a note from a lawyer, they were pre-planned, but to the enemy, random, fires at known gathering points, road junctions, Main Supply Routes, assembly areas, etc - to keep the bad guy nervous that the world around him might start exploding at any minute. Not really relevant to today's operating environment, right? But, it *is. The UAVs we fly over Afghanistan and Pakistan looking for targets of opportunity are a form of H&I fires, if you really want to parse it finely. We just have better sensors and fire control now. Of course, now I have to call them UAS's, because someone got a Legion of Merit for the name change.Anyway, I call the post H&I Fires because it's random things posted by me and people I've given posting privileges to that particular topic. Another term of art that might be appropriate is Free Fire Zone.
Regarding Confederate Widows, I am still amazed at how close we are to those days. Nearly a century and a half having passed since the start of the war, I was fortunate enough to have shaken hands with a woman who, as a young girl, used to sit on the front porch of Joshua Chamberlain's home and listen to him talk about his experiences. My own great grandfather was a Confederate soldier, as were his brothers and cousins. My neighbor's home was built by a soldier who served in the 1st Maine Heavy Artillery. In fact, if you had ancestors who were in this country during the war, it's likely you are related to someone who served on one or both sides.
I look at how soldiers lived back then, and how they live today, and with but few exceptions, many things are still the same. That war brought us the first use (by Americans) of shelter tents, rubberized ponchos and groundcloths, raincoats, magazine-loading weapons, breechloading artillery, electrically-fired land mines, balloons, the wide-spread use of anasthesia for field and hospital surgery, mandatory small pox vacinations, Triage, dedicated ambulance trains and personell, hospital ships, hospital cars on trains, military railroads, etc.
Those pix of soldiers standing around their small fire, boiling coffee in a tin cup, wearing a poncho and their shelter tents in the background would be recognisable to anyone who served from the civil war through until today.