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2007-07-25 Home Front: Culture Wars

A different take on the New Republic/Scott Thomas Affair

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Posted by trailing wife 2007-07-25 00:00|| || Front Page|| [11126 views ] Top

#1 Wonder if he would take a stab at the semiotics of Rantburg...

Posted by Seafarious">Seafarious 2007-07-25 00:08|| 2007-07-25 00:08|| Front Page Top

#2 That article is worth the read.

Posted by Penguin 2007-07-25 01:06|| 2007-07-25 01:06|| Front Page Top

#3 Heh. Pretty much how I imagined it, only this guy really hit the nail on the head and had the experience to back it up. The whole essay screamed "Northeastern liberal elitist with a bit of experience making stuff up and passing it off because nobody can challenge his authority".

Posted by gromky 2007-07-25 05:13|| 2007-07-25 05:13|| Front Page Top

#4 Damn! I think he nailed it.

Posted by Mike 2007-07-25 06:27|| 2007-07-25 06:27|| Front Page Top

#5 I think he did, too. Hurray for experts in all sorts of arcane things.
But I still am wondering how a soldier actually serving there, even if just for a short time could manage toget so many details absolutely, positively wrong!

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2007-07-25 07:30|| www.celiahayes.com]">[www.celiahayes.com] 2007-07-25 07:30|| Front Page Top

#6 Possibly a national guardsman with limited training?

I dunno, it still doesn't add up to me.

But Barnes really nails some of what rings wrong in the Scott Thomas articles. The lack of emotion plus the lack of sensory details - nobody in his stories hug, mock-punch, yell, tease, blow off anger etc. except when doing Really Bad Things to Victims.

Doesn't match the soldiers I know at all, especially in the combat arms, who tend to be pretty kinesthetic and colorful.

Posted by lotp 2007-07-25 07:35|| 2007-07-25 07:35|| Front Page Top

#7 Interesting analysis. It is also the only thing I have ever read with the word 'semiotics' that was not complete verbose twaddle.

Posted by SteveS 2007-07-25 12:30|| 2007-07-25 12:30|| Front Page Top

#8 WOW

Posted by Total War 2007-07-25 12:43|| 2007-07-25 12:43|| Front Page Top

#9 It isn't that hard to find one or two souls that are little more than uniformed civilians. Any Bde. or higher S1/G1/J1 shop can have inmates that never go outside the wire, for example.

Lotp, sir, I will have you know that the era of the "poorly trained National Guardsman" ended in the last century. There is a lot of effort expended by Guardsmen to keep well trained and prepared, for we KNOW we will have at least 1 tour in the sand box per enlistment.
You, and anyone else who speaks such slanders about the Guard have a standing invite to deploy with us on one of our tours. Or to pistols at dawn, if you prefer.

Posted by N Guard 2007-07-25 13:18|| 2007-07-25 13:18|| Front Page Top

#10 No slur intended, N Guard. You have my apologies and my deepest respect for your service and your skills.

I do believe that, at the start of hostilities in Iraq, some of our guardsmen had not had the chance to do much live fire training. It was with that in mind that, while trying to find a scenario for a 'soldier' who was in uniform but didn't even have the basics down of how a Bradley does or doesn't move (for instance), I speculated that perhaps "Scott Thomas" was such a guardsman who served briefly and early on in some staff capacity.

I know that since 2003 a lot of effort has gone into providing our Guard units the training they deserve to prepare them for the very real and critically important roles they are playing in our current operations. If I was wrong regarding training prior to then, please accept the apology of this USFA (ret) wife for her ignorance. ;-)

Posted by lotp 2007-07-25 13:26|| 2007-07-25 13:26|| Front Page Top

#11 OK, I confess ... USAF (ret) wife who also is working with/for the regular Army these days.

Posted by lotp 2007-07-25 13:26|| 2007-07-25 13:26|| Front Page Top

#12 And, re: pistols --

may i bring my own to range training? I enjoy my little 9mm Sig, can bring my own civilian version of the M9 instead, but will have to ask Mr. Lotp if he would mind my bringing anything of his with higher firepower. FWIW I did qualify (barely) at the Expert level with the M9 a couple years ago but I'm rusty these days.

I will, of course, police up my brass and help out with weapons cleaning thereafter.

Dawn is a lovley time to be an outdoor range ....

cheerfully

Posted by lotp 2007-07-25 13:30|| 2007-07-25 13:30|| Front Page Top

#13 I left a comment on the discussion thread, saying

"My daughter (that would be Cpl. Blondie, USMC) about fell over laughing at the story of running over sleeping dogs with a Bradley... And she zeroed in on the matter of supervision. There is always an NCO about, somewhere, or an officer. Junior troops just do not diddy-bop around like kids playing hooky from school. Absolutely nothing in the military happens in a vacuum. There is always someone else there, and when extraordinary events happen, there are almost always other people around who will also have a memory of them. Civilians often find this hard to believe; obviously Mr. Foer does.

As a milblogger and a writer myself, I am still wondering how one can be in the middle of such an experience, and yet be so absolutely tone-deaf to detail in writing a personal account of it. It should be the easiest thing in the world to write something fascinating and revealing, if you are in the middle of extraordinary events. Just look around; see, hear, feel, smell, siphon up your friends experiences and reactions. It shouldnt be that hard to get the small details right, at least right enough that other veterans who have been there can nod their heads and say, Yep thats what it felt like.

Its kind of sad, when you think of it. All that tuition, just to mince up and re-hash outtakes from Full Metal Jacket and Platoon, for the titillation of the other groupies in the workshop."

Posted by Sgt. Mom 2007-07-25 15:45|| www.celiahayes.com]">[www.celiahayes.com] 2007-07-25 15:45|| Front Page Top

#14 My test is always the same: When called a liar or fraud present immediate truth to the contrary. Imagine how good a LLL Moonbat would feel telling the entire Right-Wing Blogspere that: "Not only I am in the military in Iraq right now, but these stories happened who, what, when, where, and how." When I see a delay or silence I know that something is not right.

Posted by Cyber Sarge 2007-07-25 15:52|| 2007-07-25 15:52|| Front Page Top

#15 ...consulting semiotician...

The game's afoot, Datsun!

Posted by mojo">mojo 2007-07-25 17:19|| 2007-07-25 17:19|| Front Page Top

#16 I prefer not to put my semiotics or my other bodily fluids on public display like this....8p

Posted by Whealet Poodle1867 2007-07-25 18:09|| 2007-07-25 18:09|| Front Page Top

#17 I prefer not to put my semiotics or my other bodily fluids on public display like this....8p

Posted by Whealet Poodle1867 2007-07-25 18:09|| 2007-07-25 18:09|| Front Page Top

#18 My nominee for a Fiskie Award

Posted by Zorba Elmaise4368 2007-07-25 19:03|| 2007-07-25 19:03|| Front Page Top

#19 As far as it goes, I remember with great clarity the end of the N Guard "volleyball units" when Reagan came into office. It was made abundantly clear that the N Guard was no longer going to slack off.

And this was doubly changed with GWI, when Guard units that had improved were found to still need a lot more work before deployment--and that they were going to get it.

Right now, there are a lot of Guard units sporting more new hard earned combat decorations of the type and number not seen since WWII, if then. I gather at least 2/3rds of all Guardsmen have done at least one tour in theater.

Posted by Anonymoose 2007-07-25 19:05|| 2007-07-25 19:05|| Front Page Top

#20 Sorry abt snarling at you, Lotp... I still run into the occasional &^%*&%&$ who thinks that we are (still) a bunch of fat "weekend Warriors". The old Guard, with beer in the coolers at AT died shortly after desert storm.

Most of the stuff you are thinking about WRT lack of training, range time, etc. turned up during the run up to Desert Shield/Storm back in '91.

BTW-- If you come to our pistol range, you will have to make do with an issue M9. Personal weapons are absolutely forbidden nowadays. I could tell you about some of the incidents back in the day, when we did allow personal weaps, but I don't think fred's bandwidth will stretch that far.

Posted by N Guard 2007-07-25 20:16|| 2007-07-25 20:16|| Front Page Top

#21 Moose- THX for the support-
It's fun to see all the combat patches at monthly training meetings. Some of us are authorized up to 4 (!!!) different divisional combat patches. Combined with the velcro on the ACU, it can be a fun game of "which senior officer do I want to annoy, by wearing which patch today?"

As for combat vets-- any Guardsman (or -woman!) who's been in since 2004 has probably been to the sandbox at least once. I think we are supposed to be on a 5 year rotation cycle, but who knows what the cupcakes up in D.C. will do next.

2/3 veterans is a good guess, and tracks closely with my unit.

To get back to the original story, when I read it, my BS alarm tripped at the chow hall story. It dosen't matter how big an a**h**e u are, nobody puts down the wounded like that. As I am in an armored cav unit, the BS abt running over dogs with a Brad just confirmed that the writer is not combat arms, and prolly not military. See above comments about S1 denizens about lingering uncertanty.

Posted by N Guard 2007-07-25 20:33|| 2007-07-25 20:33|| Front Page Top

#22 I just don't think "Scott Thomas" is the guy who saw any of those things, good or bad, and I don't think Foer has the judgment to avoid being fooled again, and again, and again. You might say it's the tradition he was brought up in and it's a tradition that needs to die with this generation.

Oooh. Need some ice for that, Mr. Foer?
Yeah. A lot of it...

Posted by tu3031 2007-07-25 21:05|| 2007-07-25 21:05|| Front Page Top

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