Company anti-war e-mail angers military supporters

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07024/756150-96.stm

An American GI in Iraq who e-mailed a Wisconsin company to ask for a shipment of some floor mats got a brusque reply: "We would NEVER ship to Iraq. If you were sensible, you and your troops would pull out of Iraq."

The two-line e-mail response quickly circulated on the Internet and has led to threats against the Muslim-owned business and demands for a boycott.

Bargain Suppliers, an online retailer based in the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, shut down its Web site Monday and fired the unidentified employee who sent the e-mail, WTMJ-TV reported.

Co-owner Faisal Khetani, a Muslim from Pakistan, has received threatening calls, the TV station said. An answering machine at a number listed for the business said the mailbox was full and would not accept a message Tuesday.

In an e-mail dated Jan. 16, Sgt. Jason Hess asked about getting floor mats from the company.

Or, How one stupid email from a single employee can bring down a whole company.

And not sending something to individual troops stationed in Iraq does diddly for the anti-war effort.

I'm anti-war and I've been sending gift packages to troops when I can. Anything to make life a little better. Not their fault they are there, though I wish new recruits would get smart and stop signing up.

This is the link that prompted most of the "outrage". Come to find out, the soldier didn't need the mats for sleeping purposes. They needed them for their conference room.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,246100,00.html

implying the infantry doesn't use the conference room???

I'm curious what you think we actually do with most of our time in Iraq?

And WTF is a soda mess

Riiiiight.

The clerks are in the humvees, the ones without armor.

A soda mess is a pay-for-soft drink arrangement, when there are no machines around to dispense the beverages.

I don't think we spend most of our time in the conference room.

but here is a typical 48 hour cycle in SFC Sanskrit warrior's world in Iraq

0500 Get up hit the shower
0600 Go to breakfast
0700 Go to the Company CP to see what's shaking
0800-1600 Conduct patrol of AO/route clearance, etc.....
1630 Eat dinner
1700 Take shower
1730-1830 Hit the gym
1900-2000 Go to Internet cafe use email, free phones
2100-2230 Go to clamshell (Clamshell was a hardened facility where we had music, video games, etc.....)
2300 Go to bed

0500 Get up hit shower
0600 Go to breakfast
0700 Go to Company CP to see what's shaking
0800 Tell platoon we are conducting a raid tonight, tell everyone to go call their families, hit the gym, whatever, just relax meet up again at 1800 ready to go
0900-1000 Go to internet cafe use email, free phones
1000-1400 Take a nap
1400-1530 go to swimming pool (Ok only a few FOB's have swimming pools, but they are open from dawn to dark everyday)
1600 Go to mail point and collect mail
1700 Eat Dinner
1800-1900 Meet back at Company CP to brief Platoon on raid target, known intelligence and estimated danger of mission
1900 Mount up in vehicles and wait for command to leave FOB
2030 Order is given
2130 Arrive at raid site
2145 Conduct raid
0030 Leave raid site with target and any intelligence of value taken from target's home
0130 Return to FOB
0230 Finish inprocessing of detainee
0300-0400 Hit gym to work off raid stress
0500 Hit the showers.......

This is just a telescoped view, but even us in the Combat Arms in Iraq have more down time than you think. We spend less than one third of a day on average outside the wire. Sometimes its more, sometimes its far less. Sometimes if the AO is fairly quiet we scale back on daily patrols and give the platoon a day or two off completely....... There is this perception in the American public that there are bullets and bombs going off all the time. Not even close. A year in Iraq is hours and hours and hours of boring monotony punctuated by 30-60 second of chaos, violence and mayhem, then we have more and more hours of monotony, Xbox playing and listening to really bad ARAB pop.......

As for the soda mess, never seen one in Iraq........

That's FOBBIT land. And a good place to put a soda mess.

A well supplied facility wouldn't need a soda mess, but they're handy if you're out in east Jesus and the only supplies you get come in infrequently. These sorts of facilities don't have things like gyms or internet cafes, either, at least at the outset. Housing is rudimentary in the extreme, and you burn your shit in oil drums. The exchange, if you are lucky enough to have one, is in a trailer, and there's no room for cokes and so forth...so, the clever MWR types set up a soda mess--does the trick in a pinch.

In 2003-2004 yes we had a PX trailer, we had a homemade gym and I stirred my fair share of Poo stew.....

But in 2005-2006 I was back and almost every FOB had a million dollar gym, at least one internet cafe per 500 soldiers and almost everyone had air conditioned fully wired rooms made out of old shipping containers. You wouldn't be able to tell they were shipping containers the way they were refurbished. Several FOB's have swimming pools, there are three FOB's where college classes are run weekly, and finally at FOB Warrior in Kirkuk and Camp victory there are enlisted men's clubs. It's weird how much changed between my first and my second tour on the FOB's.......

I had soda within 6 weeks of the day the statue of Saddam fell. If you have been to Iraq and your experience varied then so be it. Again, I'm not saying the soda mess never existed, I just never saw one......

The e-mail is still out of bounds esp. for something sent on company "letterhead".

There's no excuse for death threats but that still doesn't diminish the rightful PR disaster this now former employeee brought on the company.

they just have to follow orders. That company is a bunch of ass holes.

in the 101st Keyboard Brigade, the goddamn Chairborne Rangers, have to CONTINUE to harass and threaten the owner of the place ... what more can the guy do??

Additionally, the rather sanctimonious lecture by the soffended oldier on the lockstep neccessity that "standards" be set is particularly laughable, given the many violations of the UCMJ that have occurred in Iraq and have not been appropriately punished. There comes a point where you have to accept that the business owner has done everything in his power to try to rectify the matter. His apology should be accepted. But no, it's way more fun to pile on, I guess:


In an e-mail to the AP, Sgt. Hess said Tuesday the employee's firing did not ease his anger over the original response.

"There should be standards set and upheld (by) the company on responding politely to e-mails from whoever goes to their site," wrote Sgt. Hess, a 31-year-old Fayetteville, N.C., native who is stationed in Taji, Iraq.

Sgt. Hess said he wanted some mats to cover the ruts in a concrete floor in a former parking garage or storage unit now used as a conference room.

Bloggers spread the original e-mail exchange far and wide, along with the company's address and phone number. At least one site included a link to a photograph of Mr. Khetani's home....

I said it yesterday and I will say it again.

The employee was in the wrong but the crazed overreaction is in manys ways worse.

If the business owner were a god-fearin' Republican pro=war Texan with a pickup truck, they'd be cheering him and saying "Yeah, he showed that snotty employee, yee haw." And the firing would have been PLENTY good.

But no, he's a Pakistani immigrant with a funny name, so it's pile-on time. It just shows us the sad fact that way too many Americans are flat-out STOOOOOOPID.

Too many of our countrymen are apparently insane.

:-(

payroll to ruin business for his government contracts. As it is, that jerk probably has cost that guy a ton of business. He'll need the money he saves by firing the guy. And it probably won't make up for the losses he incurs.

His CIC for instance. Or maybe his congresscritter because a REAL army would have quartermasters who should be able to take care of this shit.

I seriously don't get why civilians have to send body armor and toilet paper to troops in Iraq when we're spending 8 BILLION DOLLARS A MONTH.

OH, Btw, Sgt. Crybaby's little tantrum will now get e-mailed to the worlds 1 Billion muslims with a little note about how in Baghdad it would be nice to have drinking water and power which they don't have due to said Sgt's comrades in arms.

A propoganda victory it is not.

The employee was in the wrong, the crazed overreaction that has happened is very wrong but all that guy did was share his e-mail with a few friends.

If a company did that shit to a DUer don't you think it would be posted?

He fanned the flames by continuing to gripe about the matter after the business owner took appropriate action. He sent along his email, and he spoke to at least one reporter about the matter, indicating that he was still pissed off, even after the owner took remedial action.

It was unhelpful, at best, and reflected poorly upon his Service--the Army aren't a bunch of unforgiving whiners, and he represents them as such.

Had he said "Well, the guy was wrong to say it, but we've accepted the apology of the business owner and are satisfied with the action he took in response to our concerns," he probably would have made a friend, and maybe gotten some freebies from the company for his unit.

We still have a lot of Quartermaster companies......I don't think Class 9 covers comfy mats.........

you ordered something and got an e-mail back telling you that you were an evil liberal, you we be posting about here in a minute. "Sgt Crybaby" such sensitivity.

because their boss saw the bumper sticker on their truck. They get flagged as union supporters. They don't respond appropriately to "christian" cant in job interviews. Their hair is too long, They have an ear-ring.

In the field I worked in the past three years I had to be very careful not to mention my politics at work. My one concession to this was that I had a staff member who I supervised who would listen to Michael Savage on the radio as he worked. I asked him not to play political radio when there were other workers on the jobsite with him. That's it.

It's not national news when a liberal loses a job due to political discrimination.

90% of the time when I email a company with a question, I get nothing.

The company should've shipped the items at ten times the usual cost or taken the money and not shipped anything. If Halliburton can do it, why not Bargain Suppliers?

n/t

but we don't have an icon for that.

BTW Thank YOU for your service!:patriot:

Haliburton,will send the mats,they have stolen enough of our money,they can afford to send the mats.

he ain't exactly lying, either....And I thought repubs got real hard-ons for any businesses that made principled stands and did whatever they decided to do (see the drugstores that don't give out birth control on 'moral' grounds)...

I could understand if the product was something that was critical to survival, or if the product could only be bought at that one place, but to raise this much hell over floor mats says more about the military and the fighting keyboard brigade than that business...

and i'm sure the fact that it's a muslim-run business had NOTHING to do with the backlash:sarcasm:

has received threatening calls

They threaten Mexican pizza parlors, people who fly Italian flags, and others who disagree.