Category Archives: The War

The Wild West

Posted on June 19, 2007 | Comments Off on The Wild West

Passionate reporting from Michael Yon–who is throwing in his lot with Gen. Petraeus–who says a big US offensive is underway in Iraq, one that is so far largely ignored back home. "It’s like the Wild West out there," one commenter quotes her infantryman brother who is moving in with the Stryker Brigade.

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Posted in Iraq, The War, Troops

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Sir Salman

Posted on June 19, 2007 | Comments Off on Sir Salman

The usual tiresome Muslim furor over anything deemed insufficiently respectful of their religion, this time over Queen Elizabeth’s daring to knight author Salman Rushdie, makes me want to read his book "The Satanic Verses," which I admit never appealed to me before. I thought his Iranian death sentence years ago mostly a publicity stunt. But threatening rioting and suicide bombings over the book all these years later finally makes it interesting to me.

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Posted in The War

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Red Flag

Posted on June 18, 2007 | Comments Off on Red Flag

Back in the mid-80s, when I was writing technology stories, I got to blend the subject into a piece on a visit to the Air Force’s Red Flag exercises at Nellis AFB, near Las Vegas. Later in the early 90s, I went again when the local recon squadron at then-Bergstrom AFB (now Austin’s international airport) went up for the exercises. These videos at OP-FOR, from the IMAX doc on Red Flag, are so good you may get airsick watching them, but they’re from an angle only seen by the participants. My second trip, I got a conference-table full of pilots and backseaters to interview all at once. Not the ideal way to do it, but it worked out. One guy started talking airspeed in knots, stopped and started to translate the knots to mph. I said I was a sailor, so I was used to knots, just a lot smaller numbers. Smiles all around.

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Posted in Scribbles, The War

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Running al Q to ground

Posted on June 17, 2007 | Comments Off on Running al Q to ground

Wretchard says you can tell a lot about what’s going on with the big offensive in Iraq just by glancing down the long list of Multi-National Force-Iraq press releases and their titles, a lot more than usual.

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Home leave

Posted on June 17, 2007 | Comments Off on Home leave

Teflon Don is blogging his home leave. He seems to have arrived, but mentions this stop in Dallas:

"After another long stretch in the plane, we landed in Dallas. The people in Dallas are great–my first glimpse of America included a fire truck spraying an arc of water over the plane to welcome us home. Inside, the terminal was almost bare, but there was a still a small crowd that went to the airport at 6 a.m. to greet us."

Some veterans groups, particularly Vietnam veterans, organize these welcomes. Glad to see they’re still doing them at DFW. I guess the firetrucks were organized by the airport. "No one was rude," he writes, as if he expected some might be.

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Posted in Iraq, Texana, The War, Troops

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What Harry Reid said

Posted on June 15, 2007 | Comments Off on What Harry Reid said

The argument has, by now, gone way beyond whether Democrat House Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called Generals Petraeus and Pace "incompetent." (Reid has admitted as much.) But the right-of-center bloggers lost me when they got all concerned about Reid saying it "in a time of war." Hell, when’s a better time for a politician to lean on a general or three? Lincoln fired several, as I recall. This is America. Generals ain’t saints.

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Posted in The War

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At war with the Brits

Posted on June 8, 2007 | Comments Off on At war with the Brits

Another good photo essay by Michael Yon on the Brits patrolling in Southern Iraq:

"…life is simple. Sand. Wind. Sand. More wind."

Always worth a look.

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