Category Archives: Troops

The Lioness Program

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I’m a little late to the program here, this program anyhow. But it’s worth noting, and, as we see above it’s not just a Marines deal, but an Army one as well. I knew we had women fighter and gunship pilots, and women medics and armed women at security checkpoints. But I was floored by Michael Yon’s latest report showing an apparent woman rifleman on a Brit patrol in Afghanistan. I figured it was new. El Coqui, a commenter at Black Five, set me straight. The Brit woman was a Royal MP, along to search women suspects. EC pointed me to the Lioness program. Now we know.

Combat in Afghanistan

"The Taliban are very brave, but they are ignorant brutal men who murder locals who do not support them, and brave doesn’t stop bullets." Michael Yon

Sounds like the Viet Cong. Hope they don’t have the Cong’s tenacity. So far they seem not to have. But this "good war," as the Dems used to call it, to distinguish it from their "bad war" in Iraq, has a long way to go. Yon’s piece shows why. Amazes me, though, that the Brit troops have women medics and rifles. These women aren’t inadvertently in combat. They are in it on purpose. Revolutionary.

Post-9/11 G.I. Bill

The VA is doing it differently this time, using a nine minute video on YouTube to explain and promote the most generous G.I. Bill since 1944. Ninety days service since Sept. 10, 2001 is all you need to qualify.

Quagmire

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South Vietnam is what this map reminds me of. Think of the red places as NVA-controlled Indian Country. Places where our forces didn’t/don’t go for very long. S. Warzistan on the left bottom is where that Predator’s Hellfire missiles killed all those Talibani at the funeral the other day. Eighty-something. I expected to be reading of Lefty outrage about that by now. The fact I didn’t sorta figures, though.This is Barry’s campaign now. He campaigned for it. His Leftist pals wanted it. Now they’ve got it. Lotsa luck. They’re sure going to need it.

I think they’re all going to be very sorry before The One’s first term is over. Iraq was/is the Left’s hated campaign, but it’s the one that made the most sense to me. Nevermind the WMDs and all that baloney. The point in going in there was/is that it’s in the middle of the Jihadi swamp that needs to be drained. I also believe that whatever success we’ve had there had more to do with the recent Iranian uprising than anything Barry said in Cairo or anywhere else. (He’s too longwinded, too on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, to inspire anybody.) So let’s see what he’s going to do with Afghanistan. Wallow in the quagmire, I expect. Although that Predator strike on a funeral, of all things, was a good start. Wish we’d had more UAVs in South Vietnam. Apaches are nice, too.

Constant CAP

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As in, "Sleep tight, America, (Predator’s) got the CAP." 24/7

Ensign Wesley Frank Osmus, R.I.P.

U.S. Navy Ensign Osmus has been dead for sixty-seven years, but I didn’t know about him until I came across his story reading Shattered Sword, The Untold Story of The Battle of Midway. Now I keep imagining him staring at the Japanese sailor coming at him with an axe as he held onto the chain rail on the stern of Arashi, a destroyer in Nippon’s First Carrier Striking Force.

Osmus, a TBD Devastator torpedo-bomber pilot from the carrier Yorktown, had crashed in the sea, been plucked out by Arashi‘s crew and interrogated by Captain Watanabe Yusumasa. Then Watanabe ordered Osmus thrown off the stern. He grabbed hold of the chain rail; hence the sailor with the axe. Odd that his Web memorial at the University of Illinois alumni page makes no mention of his murder, though the 2007 book’s authors know it well enough and add: “Watanabe did not survive the war. Had he lived, it is likely he would have met the hangman’s noose as a war criminal.”

UPDATE:  To be fair, I suppose I should link to this, which shows how much things have changed.

USS New Orleans

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In dry dock at Manama, Bahrain. Shows repair work on the sixteen by eighteen hole that sub the USS Hartford tore in the New Orleans in the Strait of Hormuz. The Hartford got the worst of it, but it’s still impressive the New Orleans’ crew kept it afloat as they did.

Via Information Dissemination.