Ok...three of us on the team had one of the most hilarious adventures on Tuesday. We were running errands and a jerk in a Suburban raced around us spraying the entire driver's side of the truck with even more mud. Now there was already lots of mud caked on it before, but this really made it nearly impossible to see.
So, Jd decided to find a car wash. While there are several on base, they are all mostly owned by different groups, none of which we apparently belong to. We went to the the Barn, a local Iraqi market, on Camp Slayer and one of the guys told us to take it around back.
The guy in charge said we needed papers from the front office, so we went and were once again denied. However when we got back to the truck the car wash guy just took our keys and started washing. This guy was on a mission. I think the level of mud inspired him as well as the $20 Jd promised him. He had finished the roof and driver's side window when his boss came and asked for our papers approving the wash.
Well we didn't have any papers and the wash guy knew we didn't have papers and just kept washing while arguing with his boss. He even gave the washer to another employee and made him keep washing while he went argue with the boss more. He was laughing and mocking his boss the whole time behind his back while continuing to wash. Well finally the boss won out, so he just quickly finished the windows and let us go on our way.
I know I didn't do a good job of capturing the complete humor of the event, but we were rolling.
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9 comments:
I love the The leftist southpaw debate about Sheehan, good stuff there! I feel the same, if I died for something I supported and my mom gave everything to protest the honorable cause of my death, I'd be like, "geez ma, can't you at least shut your yap and stand by my decisions made when I was alive??"
Really, I'd be like, would you say the same if you knew the depth of the grief your mother was going through if you were to die at age 24?
I would do anything for my mother. If I saw her in pain, I would do anything to help her ease it. I would support anything she did to ease it. If what Cindy is doing helps her deal with her grief, then I would think Casey's spirit has no problem with that.
Lots of people are getting pretty high and mighty over this.
The woman's son is DEAD. As in never coming back. As in this mother had to bury her child.
Last question, anonymous- would you be like, talking like that to your mother if you were alive? Because I don't know who you are or who raised you, but my mother, and father, taught me the importance of honoring my mother and father. If I told my mother to shut her yap, she'd shut mine for me.
After all, none of us should be violating the ten commandments, should we now?
Honoring parents does have limits and that limit has been met in my opinion.
Southpaw, you have still yet to address the fact that everyone else in the family feels the complete opposite and that when Sheehan met the President before she became a tool of the Left, she said the exact opposite of what she is saying now.
She saw an opportunity to try to make an name for herself and has exploited the service and sacrifice of her son to do it. That in my opinion deserves no respect whatsoever.
Kind of like how the U.S. government and the NFL exploited the death of Pat Tillman, against his families wishes?
Or the way the Army embellished the Jessica Lynch story to exploit her?
Kind of like that?
The Mysterious Death of Pat Tillman
By Frank Rich
The New York Times
Sunday 06 November 2005
It would be a compelling story," Patrick Fitzgerald said of the narrative Scooter Libby used to allegedly mislead investigators in the Valerie Wilson leak case, "if only it were true."
"Compelling" is higher praise than any Mr. Libby received for his one work of published fiction, a 1996 novel of "murder, passion and heart-stopping chases through the snow" called "The Apprentice." If you read the indictment, you'll see why he merits the critical upgrade. The intricate tale he told the F.B.I. and the grand jury - with its endlessly clever contradictions of his White House colleagues' testimony - is compelling even without the sex and the snow.
The medium is the message. This administration just loves to beguile us with a rollicking good story, truth be damned. The propagandistic fable exposed by the leak case - the apocalyptic imminence of Saddam's mushroom clouds - was only the first of its genre. Given that potboiler's huge success at selling the war, its authors couldn't resist providing sequels once we were in Iraq. As the American casualty toll surges past 2,000 and Veterans Day approaches, we need to remember and unmask those scenarios as well. Our troops and their families have too often made the ultimate sacrifice for the official fictions that have corrupted every stage of this war.
If there's a tragic example that can serve as representative of the rest, it is surely that of Pat Tillman, the Arizona Cardinals defensive back who famously volunteered for the Army in the spring after 9/11, giving up a $3.6 million N.F.L. contract extension. Tillman wanted to pay something back to his country by pursuing the enemy that actually attacked it, Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Instead he was sent to fight a war in Iraq that he didn't see coming when he enlisted because the administration was still hatching it in secret. Only on a second tour of duty was he finally sent into Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, where, on April 22, 2004, he was killed. On April 30, an official Army press release announcing his Silver Star citation filled in vivid details of his last battle. Tillman, it said, was storming a hill to take out the enemy, even as he "personally provided suppressive fire with an M-249 Squad Automatic Weapon machine gun."
It would be a compelling story, if only it were true. Five weeks after Tillman's death, the Army acknowledged abruptly, without providing details, that he had "probably" died from friendly fire. Many months after that, investigative journalists at The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times reported that the Army's initial portrayal of his death had been not only bogus but also possibly a cover-up of something darker. "The records show that Tillman fought bravely and honorably until his last breath," Steve Coll wrote in The Post in December 2004. "They also show that his superiors exaggerated his actions and invented details as they burnished his legend in public, at the same time suppressing details that might tarnish Tillman's commanders."
This fall The San Francisco Chronicle uncovered still more details with the help of Tillman's divorced parents, who have each reluctantly gone public after receiving conflicting and heavily censored official reports on three Army investigations that only added to the mysteries surrounding their son's death. (Yet another inquiry is under way.) "The administration clearly was using this case for its own political reasons," said Patrick Tillman, Pat Tillman's father, who discovered that crucial evidence in the case, including his son's uniform and gear, had been destroyed almost immediately. "This cover-up started within minutes of Pat's death, and it started at high levels."
His accusations are far from wild. The Chronicle found that Gen. John Abizaid, the top American officer in Iraq, and others in his command had learned by April 29, 2004, that friendly fire had killed their star recruit. That was the day before the Army released its fictitious press release of Tillman's hillside firefight and four days before a nationally televised memorial service back home enshrined the fake account of his death. Yet Tillman's parents, his widow, his brother (who served in the same platoon) and politicians like John McCain (who spoke at Tillman's memorial) were not told the truth for another month.
Why? It's here where we find a repeat of the same pattern that drove the Valerie Wilson leak a year earlier. Faced with unwelcome news - from the front, from whistle-blowers, from scandal - this administration will always push back with change-the-subject stunts (like specious terror alerts), fake news or, as with Joseph Wilson, smear campaigns. Much as the White House was out to bring down Mr. Wilson because he threatened to expose its prewar hype of Saddam's supposed nuclear prowess, so the Pentagon might have been out to delay or rewrite a story that could be trouble when public opinion on the war itself was just starting to plummet.
It was an election year besides. Tillman's death came after a month of solid bad news for America and the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign alike: the publication of Richard Clarke's book about pre-9/11 administration counterterrorism fecklessness, the savage stringing up of the remains of American contractors in Falluja, the eruption of Sunni and Shiite insurgencies in six Iraqi cities, the first publication of illicit photos of flag-draped coffins. In the days just after Tillman's death, "60 Minutes II" first broadcast the Abu Ghraib photos, Ted Koppel read the names of the war's fallen on "Nightline," and the Pentagon's No. 2, the Iraqi war architect Paul Wolfowitz, understated by more than 200 the number of American casualties to date (722) in an embarrassing televised appearance before Congress.
Against this backdrop, it would not do to have it known that the most famous volunteer of the war might have been a victim of gross negligence or fratricide. Though Tillman himself was so idealistic that he refused publicity of any kind when in the Army, he was exploited by the war's cheerleaders as a recruitment lure and was needed to continue in that role after his death. (Even though he was adamantly against the Iraq war, according to friends and relatives interviewed by The Chronicle.)
"They blew up their poster boy," Patrick Tillman told The Post; he is convinced that "all the people in positions of authority went out of their way to script" the fake narrative (or, as he puts it, "outright lies") that followed. Pat Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, was offended to discover that even President Bush wanted a cameo role in this screenplay: she told The Post that he had offered to tape a memorial to her son for a Cardinals game that would be televised shortly before Election Day. (She said no.)
In an interview with The Arizona Republic, Mary Tillman added: "They could have told us upfront that they were suspicious that it was a fratricide but they didn't. They wanted to use him for their purposes. It was good for the administration. It was before the elections. It was during the prison scandal. They needed something that looked good, and it was appalling that they would use him like that."
Appalling but consistent. The Pentagon has often failed to give the troops what they need to fight the war in Iraq, from proper support in manpower and planning at the invasion's outset to effective armor for battle to adequately financed health care for those who make it home. But when it comes to using troops in the duplicitous manner that Mary Tillman describes, the sky's the limit.
Pat Tillman's case is itself a replay of the fake "Rambo" escapades ascribed to Pfc. Jessica Lynch a year earlier, just when Operation Iraqi Freedom showed the first tentative signs of trouble and the Pentagon needed a feel-good distraction. As if to echo Mary Tillman, Ms. Lynch told Time magazine this year, "I was used as a symbol." But the troops aren't just used as symbols for the commander in chief's political purposes. They are also drafted to serve as photo-op props and extras, whether in an extravaganza like "Mission Accomplished" or a throwaway dog-and-pony show like the recent teleconference in which the president held a "conversation" with soldiers who sounded as spontaneous as the brainwashed G.I.'s in "The Manchurian Candidate."
As Mr. Bush's approval rating crashes into the 30's, he and the vice president are so desperate to wrap themselves in khaki that on the day of the Libby indictment, they took separate day trips to mouth the usual stay-the-course platitudes before military audiences. If this was a ploy to split the focus of cable news networks and the public, it failed. Perhaps Scooter Libby is hoping that a so-called faulty-memory defense will save him from jail, but too many other Americans are now refreshing their memories of what went down in the plotting and execution of the war in Iraq. What they find are harsh truths and buried secrets that even the most compelling administration scenarios can no longer disguise.
Ok, Nick. Now discredit the direct quotes from Tillman's family.
Ok, we'll balance a left wing hack with a right wing hack- fair and balanced!
O'REILLY:
All right. Back to your book. Pat Tillman, you write about him as an example of patriotism, and unfortunately, he was killed by friendly too fire. The Army wasn't forthcoming about it. And you mention that in your book. How do you see this whole Tillman case?
MCCAIN: I think it's tragic in many respects, particularly the fact that the investigation went badly and there — initial reports from the field were not accurate. And an investigation was conducted at the insistence of Pat Tillman's mother and the truth came out.
Excerpt from a story from FoxNews on November 4, 2005:
We now know that Tillman died in friendly fire, shot accidentally by members of his own platoon. Soldiers interviewed in subsequent investigations have since testified that it was apparent to everyone involved that Tillman died from friendly fire the moment he was taken off the battlefield. A series of serious errors by Army commanders and Tillman’s fellow soldiers — none of them by Tillman himself — led to his unnecessary death. These events were tragic, but they certainly don’t reflect poorly on Tillman, his bravery, or his memory.
It’s also now clear that U.S. Army brass knew early on how Tillman died, but allowed alternative histories to permeate the media and sink in with Tillman’s friends and family for weeks. They even hid the truth from Tillman’s brother, who was in the same platoon, but didn’t witness Tillman’s death. He was immediately flown back to the U.S. with Tillman’s body.
Tillman’s public memorial service, held on May 3, 2004, took place a day after Army Secretary Les Brownlee was officially told of Tillman’s fratricide. There, Tillman was posthumously awarded a Silver Star in which the Army described battlefield events that clearly never happened. It wasn’t until May 28 that the Army told the Tillmans the real circumstances surrounding Pat’s death.
The Post reports that investigations documents show this decision was not based on a sudden desire to release the truth, but because many Army Rangers would be returning over Memorial Day, and they could no longer hold fast to the Army’s version of the story.
A subsequent investigation into the cover-up of Tillman’s death found “gross negligence” among commanders of and soldiers in Tillman’s platoon, and called for stern punishments. But here it gets odder: The officer who issued that report was quickly replaced by a higher-ranking officer.
How does that help may argument Nick??? Or is FoxNews now a tool of the left as well?
Oh, this is so much fun!
On the September 27 edition of Fox News' Hannity & Colmes, co-host Sean Hannity and right-wing pundit Ann Coulter told co-host Alan Colmes that they "don't believe" a report that Army Ranger Pat Tillman was a fan of leftist author Noam Chomsky, opposed the Iraq war, and planned to vote for Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) in the 2004 presidential election. But according to a September 25 San Francisco Chronicle report that Colmes cited, Tillman's mother said that he had planned to meet privately with Chomsky and that "Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war." Tillman, a former pro football star, served in Iraq before being killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan in April 2004.
Responding to Colmes's statement that Tillman "was a Noam Chomsky fan, was going to vote for John Kerry, was against the war in Iraq," Coulter insisted, "I don't believe it." Hannity concurred, saying, "I don't believe it either." After Colmes explained that Tillman reportedly supported the war in Afghanistan but opposed the war in Iraq, Coulter responded, "I think you got that from one of those documents Mary Mapes handed to Dan Rather" -- an apparent reference to CBS' controversial report on President Bush's National Guard service, which was produced by Mapes and relied in part on unauthenticated memos. However, the Chronicle article, which focused on the military's alleged efforts to conceal facts about Tillman's death, quoted Tillman's mother, Mary Tillman, directly:
Mary Tillman said a friend of Pat's even arranged a private meeting with Chomsky, the anti-war author, to take place after his return from Afghanistan -- a meeting prevented by his death. She said that although he supported the Afghan war, believing it justified by the Sept. 11 attacks, "Pat was very critical of the whole Iraq war."
I think I'm beginning to understand the philosophy of the right - when a man dies in battle, and his mother speaks out, ATTACK THAT WOMAN AND HER CRAZY IDEAS!
What the hell would she know about her son, anyway???
Hey annoymous- Think Pat Tillman is somewhere saying, "geez ma, can't you at least shut your yap and stand by my decisions made when I was alive??"
Southpaw...
Normally I'd agree with Nick on the reliability of a Frank Rich article, but from what I learned about the story from my former MSNBC co-workers, in this case he is accurate in his portrayal of the Tillman story. I was equally upset and disappointed in the handling of the incident.
That does not however give you the right to use that misrepresentation to misrepresent the truth in the Sheehan case unless you don't mind being a hypocrite.
The Tillman story is done in that the truth was finally told even though unfortunately no one was reprimanded that I'm aware of.
Second all this is doing is once again pointing out that you are doing the exact same thing by ignoring the whole picture and instead just focusing on one person, who by the way has no credibility due to the fact that she has two completely different stories.
So, being you continue to refuse to answer my question, as far as I'm concerned this thread is done.
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