Archive » 2007 » March

For the last time, her devoted daughter reports. Send her your prayers and best wishes. Ever the blogger, the laptop is by her bedside and her daughter is staying touch with readers: I’m at her bedside now, holding her hand. I tell her she has 292 comments on the latest blog post..her last but she [...]

Update: Allah smells blood in the water. Nancy Pelosi is calling on the attorney general to resign. Laura Ingraham blasted Gonzales last week. Patterico has ongoing coverage. Rich Lowry says: “Smart insiders are thinking he’s out, perhaps by the end of the week. For what it’s worth…” For what it’s worth, I can’t say I’ll [...]

Shamrocks and the “guest worker” sham exposed: Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern, at the White House to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, said Friday that he hopes the U.S. Congress will embrace President Bush’s immigration proposal that would affect illegal Irish immigrants in the United States. “The resolution of this issue would mean enormous amounts to [...]

My prediction: The Council on American-Islamic Relations will be hounding this American soldier and milking this incident for every last “Islamophobia”-mongering dime they can raise (via the AJC and hat tip: Laura Mansfield): Spc. Craig Perkins’ uniform made him a target in Baghdad – and, he believes, again in an apartment complex near Clarkston. Perkins, [...]

As promised, our full video report on The Gathering of Eagles: Many highlights there, but take special note of the face-off at the 6:00 minute mark. As you can see, we spent most of the day covering the march on the Eagles’ side of the fence. Why? Because almost all of the news camera crews [...]

***Update: Heidi at Gathering of Eagles reports on the National Park Service estimate of the GoE turnout: 30,000 strong. The silent majority no more.*** ***Update March 18, 2007 1:30am: The NYTimes lies…*** Pure bullcrap. Yup, the journalistic standard-bearers of the NYTimes relied on “several veterans of the antiwar movement” to give them crowd estimates of [...]

A very sincere thank you to Michelle for inviting us to play with her blog this past week. She’s been one of milblogging’s biggest, best, and brightest advocates, and -perhaps more importantly- she’s totally cool about all the dumb links we send her. I know that SMASH, Blackfive, Greyhawk, and I had a blast filling [...]

May Greyhawk forgive me for seizing on his mini-series. But there’s a few more milbloggers worthy of mention. Instapinch isn’t so much a blog as it is one former F14 Tomcat aviator’s shrine to his recently retired, much loved air frame. The author, “Pinch” Paisley, currently serves as a commander in the Navy Reserves, and [...]

A veteran of more than one tour to Iraq, Navy corpsman “Doc” also has a must-read milblog. Here he addresses the topic of PTSD, and points to others who’ve experienced it themselves. Another milblogger with some insight into the wounds of war is Chuck Ziegenfuss. Chuck was blogging from Iraq as a company commander, routinely [...]

Milblogger and Afghanistan vet Major John (of the weekly News of Afghanistan roundups) visits Arlington: …when I asked at the lady at the information desk where I could go to find the burials from Afghanistan, I was told that information was not being given out publically, since there were some people going there and “misbehaving”.

The news being a bit slow today (and really, “news” being what it’s generally accepted to be, best for all of us it stays that way) I’ll take a moment to introduce some more milbloggers to those of you who have yet to have the pleasure… Buck Sargent (he spells it like that, and does [...]

Bryan Preston and I are headed down to the Gathering of Eagles. Hope to see you there, too. I’ll blog when my fingers and connection aren’t frozen. Also hope you have enjoyed the milbloggers this week. Smash has bid adieu, but everyone else may still be popping in through the rest of the day. My [...]

Brian Turner is a part time professor at a Bay Area college and a published poet. He’s also a soldier. Words written by the light of a red-tinted flashlight offer a poet’s-eye view of American soldiers’ life in Iraq: the fear, the loss, the heartache, the uncertainty and the rare moments of calm and beauty [...]

Here’s a little Friday evening Mike Yon for ya’ll. Wish there was some compelling story behind the shot, but what I got from Mike was basically: Not sure where we were going. I spend so much time on the roads that I don’t even remember. Good enough for me! Besides, tanks hanging out next to [...]

On behalf of my co-bloggers Blackfive, Greyhawk, and Noonan, I’d like to thank Michelle for trusting her blog to us this week. Unless there’s some earth-shattering important breaking news in the next few hours (No, Donald Trump calling Bush “probably the worst president in the history of the United States” doesn’t count; I mean, who [...]

Two video blogs of note return to the 17 inch LCD screen today. Round one: Former special forces warrior Tony Soprano Uncle Jimbo from Blackfive hits us with some Bacardi-inspired knowledge in his Friday Freefly series. Round two: Mary Katharine Ham and her faithful intern have assembled an all-star news team to help the nutroots [...]

An alert reader has informed me that C-SPAN plans to cover tomorrow’s defeatist ANSWER rally, but not the pro-victory Gathering of Eagles event. How does C-SPAN determine its schedule? The C-SPAN networks are committed to televising the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate when they are in session. In addition, C-SPAN covers congressional [...]

The Dawn Patrol, a “daily roundup of information on the War on Terror and other topics – from the MilBlogs and other sources around the world” is your gateway to the world of the deployed milblogger, featuring milbloggers stationed in Iraq: Acute Politics Badgers Forward Jack Army and The Marching Camp Broken Masterpieces has frequent [...]

A rant by Cindy Sheehan, posted by defeatist David Swanson on his website advocating the impeachment of President Bush: More Reich-Wing Horse Pucky The Gathering of Eagles is supposedly a veterans’ ad hoc group who are allowing themselves to be despicably stage-managed by Rove and Move America Forward using fascist tactics to lie about an [...]

Sandstorms settled in the south of that sour place, and terror-men opened wide a mouth etched in a hate-filled face. The rifle-spit struck down Malone and he in a moment gave life well-lived, alone, to set men free of the grave. In later days men drew down statues from on high; they struck Iraqi ground [...]

Paratroopers from B Company, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division moves out on patrol into the Ghorak Valley of the Helmand Province in Southern Afghanistan during “Operation Achilles March 6. Photo by Spc. Matthew T. Littel, U.S. Army From time to time, Staff Sergeant D (on the Pakistan-Afghan [...]

Next week is the 4 year anniversary of the Battle of An-Nasiriyah. The road to Nasiriyah burns. The post below is a shortened version of thousands upon thousands of hours of research, which culminated in one of my all-time favorite historical non-fictions: Marines in the Garden of Eden by Richard S. Lowry. Together, Richard and [...]

Had enough yet?

I’m busy these days getting ready for my second tour in Iraq. Sometimes I’m asked why – especially since I’m eligible to retire – I would go back. One reason: because these are the sorts of people I won’t abandon.

Do you know what today (March 15) is? It’s the Fifth Annual International Eat an Animal for PETA Day! Meryl Yourish, the originator of IEAPD, explains: PETA has started yet another offensive ad campaign. This one really reaches bottom—they are using Holocaust terminology, quotes, and pictures to liken the “slaughter” of animals to the slaughter [...]

A soldier blogs from Walter Reed: I know that to many people what I am writing is disturbing. It is disturbing because you can’t imagine it. It is disturbing because you let it happen. But this is just a blog. This is just a small slice of my life; typed ad-hoc and without consideration onto [...]

NZ Bear writes: The Victory Caucus has published the full text of the House Democrats emergency supplemental bill. This includes a downloadable PDF version and a browseable / linkable version online, here. Check it out: this will enable bloggers to link directly to the page of the bill that they are commenting upon. I’m also [...]

Iraq war vet Dadmanly considers Hillary Clinton’s announcement of a “plan” to reduce troops in Iraq. (And by the way, if you aren’t familiar with Dadmanly, you might want to try a longer visit. His in-Iraq archives start in earnest about here.) I’d tell you what I think of the plan, but I’m going to [...]

First, having visited Walter Reed many times to visit wounded friends, I never even knew that Building 18 existed. I do know that there were some complaints in the hospital that were not addressed very expeditiously (or at all). And I worry about this media frenzy’s affect on the excellent, world class doctors, nurses and [...]

Is Pakistan, according to my buddy Steve Schippert. Weekly Standard: Pakistan certainly has elements which pose a threat of future (and current) acts of terror. However, the unsettling potential convergence of Pervez Musharraf and an assassin’s bullet or bomb is all that separates a developed nuclear arsenal from these developed international terrorist networks. Should this [...]