Oerdin's Iraq thread.

[Chemical Ollie]

Originally posted by Agathon
Hey Oerdin. When you come back you can start a protest movement and pretend to throw away your medals. Then you'll stand a good chance of being elected president in 30 years time.

Let's hope he doesn't get any medals. At least not of the purple kind.

[Kropotkin]

Yeah, purple is just so gay!

[debeest]

Oerdin, stay safe. I think of you often and want you to get home.

[Sirotnikov]

Be safe man,

Tell me, do the soldiers know of the recent headlines on world media about picutres of alleged torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners?

How are you guys responding to it?

How are the Iraqis?

And how are the higher military authorities dealing with it?

[Ted Striker]

He actually posted about it in the thread about the torture.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?threadid=113901&pagenumber=4

[Chemical Ollie]

This is post number 500 in this thread so I guess Ming will show up soon.

I've cut and pasted the essential parts of this thread into a word document. It's 40 pages long - Oerdin, you could write a book!

I have put in Oerdins story and relevant questions from us others but removed all spam and unrelated comments.

[Dinner]

It looks like I will be leaving Baghdad tomorrow and we expect the convoy to be rough. The last group that convoyed down got hit with a number of IEDs and they ran into a two mile long ambush from Iraqis firing small arms and RPGs. The whole convoy ran through it firing as they went then when they were in the clear the Bradleys & the Abrams turned around and went back to take a second wack at the bad guys. The Arabs had thought the convoy had fleed and they didn't expect them to come back so they were surprised when the tanks opened fire on them. From what I understand the armored vehicles pretty much mowed down every armed Arab they ran across plus they destroyed several buildings the Arabs were firing from.

So any way we've been trying to get ready for our deployment to Najaf by reading all of the SitReps (operations reports) from the various companies in the AO, loading up 2 months worth of supplies into our little trailer which we will tow behind our humvee, and rerigging all of our gear in our new humvee. The humvee isn't armored but it does have armored doors so it is something of an improvement. The one downside is that adding 1500lbs of steel plating has slowed down the vehicle considerably. Still slow and armored is probably better then slightly fast without any armor.

Talk to you later.

[Dinner]

Originally posted by Sirotnikov
Tell me, do the soldiers know of the recent headlines on world media about picutres of alleged torture and humiliation of Iraqi prisoners?

It's frustrating that 17 people out of 200,000 US service men & women in the middle-east commit a crime and then we see leftists come crawling out of the wood work blamming everyone in uniform for what happened. Yes, it was terrible. Yes, the people who did it should be punished but it is wrong to try to tar everyone here with that brush. The difference between us and Saddam is that we will go after everyone who breaks the law even if the purpatraitors are on our side; Sadam wouldn't have even cared.

I hope I won't have to read any more rants by lefties claiming the US is no different then Saddam.

How are you guys responding to it?

EVeryone is shocked and disappointed but the authorities are dealing with it sternly. I think the corrective action will be applied and we should be glade that we have a displinary system which helps remove the bad apples.

How are the Iraqis?

They are angry but most of them realize that this was not systematic behavior and those guilty will be punished. The anti-US folks are of course trying to make propaganda value out of this and networks like Al Jazeera are taking the pictures and showing them without any context so it will hurt us.

[PLATO]

Originally posted by Chemical Ollie
This is post number 500 in this thread so I guess Ming will show up soon.

Request to Ming and the Owners: Can we leave this thread open in order to maintain a complete record of Oerdin's experiences in Iraq?

[Ming]

Originally posted by PLATO


Request to Ming and the Owners: Can we leave this thread open in order to maintain a complete record of Oerdin's experiences in Iraq?

Oerdin PM'ed me and asked for me to close this one when it hit 500 but start part II.

So...

http://www.apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=114080