Out the door to a dinner, but here's something to pass up the food chain.
Roadracing World, a motorcycle roadracing magazine and website I read regularly, intermittently publishes letters from riders and racers stationed over in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Here's an excerpt from one published today:My former NCOIC was severely injured in a terrible roadside bomb yesterday. He was in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle commander's hatch when it exploded and some shrapnel hit him in the back of the neck. Luckily the convoy he was in was right next to a U.S. base so they managed to air-evacuate him almost immediately. He spent about 6 hours in surgery and they almost declared him dead twice. They finally managed to stabilize him but they weren't showing any brain activity. So basically they thought he had brain stem damage. But this morning he was doing better and they are putting him under observation for 2 days to see if the swelling in his brain goes down before they try to evacuate him to Germany. My soldiers are pretty upset. He is now the 3rd soldier that I personally know who has been killed or severely injured here. He had a month left to go--he has a wife and 3 kids back in Germany. We are all just praying for his recovery.If the latter is true, than someone needs to get hammered. We're still at war, and to the extent that the JAG staff is applying peacetime public-defender standards (and remember, I'm the pro-defense attorney liberal) there's something seriously wrong.The other bad news is that for some reason the stupid idiots at the Corps level JAG are deciding to clean out the jails here in Iraq. Well, instead of letting out the low-level weapons violators they are letting out the terrorists that are involved in putting out these roadside bombs--because they claim that we don't have enough evidence against them. In the last two weeks three major figures in the main bad guy group here have gotten out--and we have already seen the results as one of our unit's informants has already been assassinated. So it seems like everything we have worked for for the last year and the 13 deaths our unit has sustained has been for nothing. We are all pretty discouraged.
If anyone knows more about this, I'd love to hear about it.
klaatu breaks silence to say:
I know something about it, in the sense that I know some of the JAGs involved in this process, rather than any details of any cases. They are good, diligent officers.
I hope that this is not some anonymous made-up smear, like the "Maine teachers controversy" meant to mobilize the base's rage against "libruls."
Let's just say everybody is doing their best in a tough situation.