In other, sickening news:
Kim Murphy, in the Los Angeles Times tells the story of SFC Walter Taylor who, in the middle of a firefight saw a black car pull up in the middle of the engagement, a figure dressed in black emerge from the car which appeared to have wires hanging from it. SFC Taylor thought the figure was about add a massive explosion to the confusion that comes with war and shot the figure, who turned out to be a doctor, Aqilah Hikmat, a mother of four who was coming to the fight to render aid.
SFC Taylor is facing murder charges as a result;
We’ll just let our friend Bill Quick take lead here:
This is insane. Get our people out of that Islamist shithole right now, so they aren’t facing heads-you-lose, tails-they-win crap like this any more. Let Afghanistan rot.
And there’s more, but that about captures the gist of it.
His Imperial Majesty couldn’t agree more. This is ridiculous. No, it’s not ridiculous. It’s a fucking travesty of galactic proportions.
And this is where we need to vent, so we’ll stick that below the fold.
Do we care that Dr. Hikmat was killed? Yes, we do. It’s a tragedy. WAR is a tragedy. That’s why we try our damndest not to get into any if we can avoid it because there is no such thing as a “clean” war. Wars are dirty, messy, horrible, tragic, horrifying and a number of other adjectives we could think of, but we’ll try to be short (you can stop laughing now), and here’s the kicker: SHIT HAPPENS.
SFC Taylor, knowing only too well what the M.O. of the subhuman pisslamist beasts we’re fighting is, most likely from personal and equally tragic experience, and so he did what a soldier is supposed to do in a situation where you have only fractions of a second to make a decision and the wrong one can cost you and your buddies their lives.
And now he’s facing murder charges as a result?
Are you fucking KIDDING us???
Only the pervasive myth that treasonous pacifist lefties has built up over decades since Viet Nam, the myth that our troops are a bunch of sadistic, cold, heartless killers jonesing for some killing can possibly explain why those charges are brought in the first place. Does any sentient being really, honestly believe that SFC Taylor wanted to kill that woman? That he clearly had no reason to shoot but, being the heartless baby killer that everybody in uniform is according to the leftist catechism, decided to just shoot the heck out of her anyway?
If not, then what the everloving fuck are the grounds for those charges?
Hey, why don’t we bring up every single member, from navigator up to the commander in chief, of the WWII 8th Air Force on charges for every single civilian who died in the bombing campaign in Germany? Clearly they deliberately murdered every single one of those civilians. That’s the only reason they released those bombs anyway.
We hope that you can see the implied sarcasm tags up there. If not, go the back of the class.
It’s fucking hard to be a sheepdog, you know. We do know that SFC Taylor knows by now. You risk everything you have to protect the ignorant, bleating fucks because that’s who you are, you even volunteer your own life to keep them safely within the comfortable cocoon they live in where unicorns dance in the meadows and nobody ever dies unless they really need killing, and then you end up on charges for doing your job. The job that they didn’t have a fucking problem sending you out to do so THEY didn’t have to.
What of it, sheep? Do you think that SFC Taylor, even though he did NOTHING wrong, ISN’T going to have nightmares for the rest of his life about that incident? Do you think that he’s NOT going to spend the rest of his life second-guessing himself, even though he knows better, wishing that he’d had some magical, god-like insight so he hadn’t pulled the trigger? Do you? If so, you’re too fucking ignorant to be allowed an opinion.
You see, that’s the kind of reality that SFC Taylor and every other warrior like him has to live with every last everloving day of their lives. All so that YOU don’t have to. Which is alright, because that’s what the job is all about: To shoulder a burden so thousands of others won’t have to shoulder it. It’s worth it. It really is, even though it’s tough.
But you’re not making it any fucking easier by being such a bunch of ungrateful, bedwetting fucks. When you do that, you make it unnecessarily hard at times for troops on the line to figure out just who or what they’re fighting for. And in a life-or-death situation where microseconds count, you can’t AFFORD that.
But we suppose that you’d rather have a thousand sheepdogs die than risk hurting somebody’s feelings, right?
What the fuck is it to YOU if SFC Taylor goes to jail for the rest of his life, loses his future, his family loses a father, a brother, a son, as long as YOU can keep living your dream in which nobody innocent ever dies? It’s not like YOU’RE paying the price, is it?
And that’s just how you like it, you pasty-faced, cowardly shits, isn’t it? Let somebody ELSE pay. You want your Oprah, your mall trips, your personal safety, the surety that you won’t be beheaded by some cave-dwelling savage, your illusion that the world is a wonderful, harmless place where no bad things happen to good people, and you don’t give a flying fuck if somebody else has to pay the price for that because, hey, you’re ENTITLED to that, aren’t you? So you’ll happily sacrifice somebody who makes less than a fry cook at Mickey D’s in order to keep that nice little cocoon of yours nice and warm as long as you can maintain your self-righteousness.
A self-righteousness that you have done nothing, NOTHING to earn.
Somebody else has to earn that for you, right? Somebody else has to pay that price, right? Because you’re ENTITLED.
Fuck you. Fuck you in so many different and utterly horrifying ways that nobody would ever dare put a description of it down on paper for fear that the act of doing so would incinerate their very souls within their bodies.
You’re not worthy. You’re self-indulgent parasites aspiring to worthlessness, which would be a huge step up for you.
It used to be that Grandpa Who Fought in the War would never talk about it, and the rest of the family would understand that the reason was that he’d seen and done things that he didn’t want to burden his loved ones with. And everybody would be OK with that and, moreover, they would be grateful that he’d shouldered those burdens so that the rest of us didn’t have to.
Now it’s “he was a heartless murderer who deserves to be punished.”
Here’s the thing: All that we’re asking, those of us who served, is pretty much nothing at all. A “thank you” might be appropriate on occasion, but most if not all of us really don’t expect that either because we don’t know what to do with it. We weren’t exceptional, we just did a job that needed doing. Now, our buddies and others we’d heard about in the service, THEY deserve it, because they really did something spectacular, but we didn’t. Funny thing is if you were to ask those others, they’d say the same thing. So it’s not gratitude we’re looking for even though I and my brothers and sisters can all come up with a list of other brothers and sisters who SHOULD get some. Every single one of them deserves praise in my eyes, but I don’t, because I didn’t do anything. They did. And they’d say the same thing.
What we ARE asking is this: Could you at the very least refrain from making us worry about having a knife stuck in our backs from the ones we were protecting. Our OWN kind?
Is that too much to ask?
Obviously it is.
I’m not talking about real war criminals. They need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. They’re wrong, and they are, believe it or not, even MORE offensive to real warriors than they are to civilians. Because those bastards dishonor us all. They are everything we stand against and we hate them even worse than we hate the enemy. They violate our code, they violate our brotherhood and they are not merely offensive in our eyes, they’re in dire need of being exterminated for their transgressions.
You think I’m exaggerating for effect? I’m not. You see, war is inhuman and horrible, and the Code is the only thread that connects you with sanity. There is no way you can do the job, the job you’re trained for, in a “nice” and “civilized” manner. So you have a Code to go by. Things you just cannot and will not do. It’s what keeps you from “going Asiatic”, to use an old term. Look it up if you don’t know what it means. It became known in WWII PTO, but it applies to all wars.
And it applies to all of us, no matter who we are or where we were. At some point, we came to the horrible realization that we’d lost something through our training. We’d lost, not the unwillingness to do harm, but the inability to do so. At that moment of truth, it doesn’t matter what the circumstances were, we realized that we could and that we would. We’d lost our innocence, and we realized that we’d never get it back.
Once lost, it’s gone. And the next thing you do, once you realize that, is to make sure that your fail-safe is operational, that you still have that Code, that leash upon what has been unleashed, that safety net, that new law that you will never, EVER violate. The Code. It is your lifeline. What you have learned is valuable, it can save lives, it is not a Bad Thing, but you have to have a leash on it. And that’s what the Code is.
So anybody violating that Code is even worse to a warrior than what any civilian might think of him.
Yet you’re lumping SFC Taylor in with those?
That pisses me off. That is one HECK of a serious charge, and a whole boatload of tangible evidence that he was doing this for “thrills” is necessary for me to not take it as a mortal insult. Not only an insult to him, but to all of us. Yet the only evidence I see is that he fired shots that ended the life of somebody who really didn’t need to die without him knowing that said individual was no threat.
Would it be better if he’d taken the chance without the glory of 20/20 hindsight vision that Dr. Hikmat was a non-combatant? No it wouldn’t. He would have been a failure if he had. Hundreds, if not thousands of our troops have died because of that hesitation and it is ONLY because we now know, having knowledge that wasn’t available to SFC Taylor at the time, that Dr. Hikmat wasn’t a threat that we can now, that YOU can now feel righteous in bringing charges against him.
And again, if he is found guilty, you won’t have to pay the price that he’ll be paying, will you?
No you won’t. But you sure as FUCK will be basking the “glory” of having been “righteous.”
We hope, if that is the case, that you spend every single day and night of the rest of your lives thinking about all the things that SFC Taylor could have enjoyed if it hadn’t been for your “righteousness”, we hope that not a moment goes by without you considering just what the consequences of your “righteous” indignation were, and we hope that you live to be a thousand years old.
Because then YOU, for a change, will be shouldering the burden of what you’ve done the same way that warriors have done for thousands of years and then, MAYBE then you’ll understand just how bloody, unforgivably ungrateful you worthless fucks are.
Thatisall.
UPDATE: As both LC Roguetek and LC Erbo points out in the comments (LC Erbo was first, but the spamfilter for some obscure reason ate him for a snack until we could rescue him. WTF, spamfilter???), SFC Taylor was served with those ridiculous charges while in sick bay recuperating from having his face torn off by another bunch of ululating, subhuman savages.
“Thank you for your service and sacrifice, SFC Taylor, see you in court.”
OK, OK, now we literally ARE fucking speechless.
Anybody know if you can buy range targets with pictures of JAG-offs on them? Seriously!