I have recently picked up some anonymous comments on military affairs articles from a man that goes by ‘B.’ Concerning most subjects dealt with on this site I prefer commentators and guest authors to use an alias, so that nothing written here will come back to haunt them in their public and private lives. We live during a witch hunt revival, and I believe anyone who has not openly forsaken the World Order and stepped outside the economy—such as myself—should do everything they can to maintain the efficacy of what Joseph Campbell called their Mask at the end of his lecture Transformations of Myth Through Time.
These two brief comments to articles of mine that are less important than this man’s commentary, I am posting here, partially as a demonstration of the iconoclastic quality of our readership, and in part in hopes of encouraging ‘B’ to write a few short pieces for this site. In B’s commentary we see the Lion-like shadow of primal, honorable, Man, represented in the Iliad by Homer’s Achilles, railing against the corruption of manhood by materialistic society, represented by Agamemnon. In allegorical terms the story of the Iliad, of the subtext of Achilles and Agamemnon—of The Rage of Achilles which opens the book and troubled even the gods—is the story of Man the Warrior being submerged in, and defiled by, the war-making machine that supplants him, but ironically preserves the memory of his essence and deeds. Below ‘B’ projects that subtext for us onto the screen of our most recent Troy.
On the Reporting of the Fall of an Iraqi Post to ISIS
Their sources are either Iraqis reporting other Iraqis' hearsay, or American officers reporting a polished version of other American officers' reports of Iraqi hearsay.
If it comes from an Iraqi, it's 30% exaggeration and 70% outrageous lie. I'm surprised they didn't claim ISIS had dragons breathing fire on them.
So I assume there were four suicide vehicle bombs, one of which broke down or got stuck in rubble, and then the Iraqi army broke and ran for it.
By the way, simple concertina wire, staked down, will stop a tracked vehicle dead. Once that shit gets hoovered up in the sprockets, you have to get out and spend several hours with pliers and wire cutters picking it out. It's not like ISIS has an engineering squad attached to every SVBIED, ready to put a bangalore in. So that's an SVBIED to breach every wire obstacle. Unless the grunts get out and start manually pulling up the wire, but that's why you cover your obstacles with fire.
Not to mention the ample supply of antitank mines the Iraqi army has, or the fact that half of those Shia militia guys spent 2004-2008 rigging IEDs to blow up American vehicles, and presumably could have done the same in Ramadi.
People want to assume that it's Stalingrad there, but I suspect it's like the cut scenes from Dumb and Dumberer, with guns and bombs.
On the Imperial Nature of Postmodern U.S. Military Service
During the last several years of my military time, I was hoping for a coup.
Then I read Hennisart's Wolves In The City.
The French generals were a lot tougher and better educated than almost anyone in US uniform today. They'd started off doing Jedburgh team jumps into occupied France in WW2, went on through the meat grinder of Indonesia (many through Dien Bien Phu) and Algeria. In the meantime, they'd gotten real educations, not degrees in Business Management from West Dickhole State like your typical US officer.
Yet when they tried to launch a coup against their government, which was obviously betraying their country, they failed miserably, turning on each other and crawling to De Gaulle for forgiveness within days.
I understood that a career spent in a careerist organization has the effect of undermining character and training/selecting for poor moral courage, and that nobody in the US military with the rank and position to plan and launch a coup had the courage to do so successfully. I started looking for a new social value system.
Perhaps the guys coming back will run various factions in the American Civil War, but I suspect most of them will come down on the side of whatever looks most like the State.
As for Fred Reed-he's a bit hypocritical, since his whole shtick throughout his writing career has been built on his combat service in Vietnam. That said, American public pro-military sentiment is largely of the Walmart/UFC kind; hard to get really excited about the latest War in Dacia, but good form to thank the legionnaires.
Thank you, ‘B.’
Brilliant! B seems to have come to a lot of the same conclusions I have about Iraq and where it's veterans (myself included) will land.
Mister Vane,
Welcome aboard, and I cheered heartily at the bombardment of the Governor's gallows.