The Horror

As horrific as it is, everyone should read this horrific comment some commenter left in the comments of the last post:

Pleading said...

Mike, please, please, PLEASE stop writing stuff like this and get back to what you do best - writing truth from the frontlines! If I want to read romance novels I can get one from the stacks on the wife's nightstand or the bookshelves or the boxes full of them in the spare bedroom. But I hardly ever do! When I come here I want to read stories of real COMBAT - between you and General Brooks, or General McChrystal, or General Menard, or that Admiral, any of those British Generals, all the PAO monkeys, and anyone else who is stupid and incompetent and in over their heads and proves it by going mano-a-mano with you! Also I want to see pictures YOU took of guns and young boys and stuff, not photoshopped covers of the same damn books that I see in front of my wife's face so often that I can't even remember what she looks like.

Your shit list hasn't grown at all this week! Please come back to us, Mike, before it's too late!

That's what I get for trying to write something for the members of "the fairer sex." But don't worry, "pleading," I will be back to writing about McSpiders and his merry band of PAO Monkeys soon enough.

Like right now - because I wouldn't be surprised if "pleading" IS McSpiders himself, or one of his shifty-eyed foreign undergenerals or PAO Monkeys sent here to attack. A few years ago they tried the same thing with my fellow frontline non-blogger/non-journalist Mike Yon.

The dispute over the unattributed and unauthorized distribution of my photographs has been resolved in principle to the satisfaction of the involved parties. The dispute had been exacerbated by Army lawyers, but once the matter was brought forefront and examined by Brigadier General Brooks, Chief of Public Affairs, it was resolved by another more senior Army attorney. At the end of the day, the Army did the right thing. I greatly appreciate the efforts of those involved, including the blogosphere and Brigadier General Brooks, whose determined attention and immediate action removed the obstacle.

Whoops - sorry, wrong quote. This is the one I meant, it's from a year later.

I don't like being here at all. I really hate getting shot at, and even today as I write these words on March 20, 2007, Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks is evicting me from another trailer...

I am persistent to a fault when it comes to gathering and conveying raw information, especially the kind that no one else seems to cover. And even when reporting it will come back to hurt me. Like this eviction notice I received last week, ostensibly because of the surge, but in fact I was told the order came from Brigadier General Vincent K. Brooks, and there were still trailers available. General Brooks used to be the Chief of the entire Public Affairs. The man who would stand up there and give all those fancy CENTCOM briefings. (Which make for interesting reading.) Now his big office is just down the road.

That was from the early days of the surge, and those idiot PAO monkeys and their lying, no good, fancy-office-having general wouldn't even give him a trailer with internet access and instead expected him to report on the surge from a tent and get his own internet access somehow! Sure enough, one of those PAO monkeys attacked Mike in his comments, too. That is their modus operandi.

Michael,Let me give you some advice.First, quit pissing off GO's [General Officers], you should know as well as anybody that they all have some degree of God-like syndrome.Don't try on remove the tree from the top down; bottom up is the way to go. Seek out and make relationships with junior enlisted and junior NCO's, they can help you get it done.

Can you believe it? That's THE Mike Yon he was talking to! As if that wasn't bad enough, it got ten times worse - the guy would not let up!

When someone in a position to help reaches out and tries to open up a line of communication, perhaps you should reply directly rather than using the fact that they reached out to you as a point of irony in one of your articles, ;-)We might be able to help smooth out some bumps in your road, of course if we can smooth out those bumps, you won't be able to write about them anymore.

"We want to help," this lying liar lied, "Good luck and keep up the good work!Out." This didn't fool Mike Yon for a minute! "This clumsy, disingenuous, planted comment is coming from CENTCOM," he said.

...in an informal, off the cuff comment, probably intended to undermine the credibility of my complaints, CENTCOM's OKW Zig rattles off a list of "helpful suggestions" that ultimately prove the point that the military's media arm is shriveled to such a degree that it can only reliably deliver self-inflicted wounds.

Turns out General Brooks was incompetent and in over his head. Fortunately they were able to work all that out just in time for Mike to be the first one to report the surge was working and we won the war. But now when I see comments like the one from "pleading," telling ME what I need to be writing or thinking or saying or doing I know what they are REALLY saying, and I know who is really saying it. And I know what language they are saying it in, even though I am not fluent in it like I am fluent in English and German. It is the language of the shit weasel.