A little horror with that turkey today?

Take a look at this: http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_Books&newDisplayURN=200408020033

If this is the review, I truly can't imagine the book.

<snip>

Wright was an embedded reporter for Rolling Stone magazine with the First Marines Reconnaissance Battalion, a unit of highly trained, ultra-violent young men blitzing through Mesopotamia in a phalanx of lightly armoured Humvees. As a fighting machine, they are terrifyingly effective. Fuelled by M&M's and mouthfuls of instant coffee granules, armed with .50-calibre machine-guns and supported by Apache helicopters, they are almost completely invulnerable to attack. These postmodern crusaders have triumphed both over bullets (with Kevlar vests and helmets) and over darkness (with night-vision goggles and laser sniper sights). Their strategy is simple: when in doubt, "bomb the shit out of it".

<snip>

As 19-year-old Corporal Harold Trombley says:

I was thinking just one thing when we drove into that ambush . . . "Grand Theft Auto: vice city". I felt like I was living it when I seen the flames coming out of the windows, the blown-up car in the street, guys crawling around shooting at us. It was fucking cool.

For this Columbine generation, killing is routine. Briefings end with the cry: "Kill!" Shooting a man is "popping your cherry". One soldier wishes that he had dropped the bomb on Hiroshima ("a couple dudes killed hundreds of thousands. That fucking rules!"), while another observes: "We're like America's little pit bull. They beat it, starve it, mistreat it, and once in a while they let it out to attack somebody." A marine chaplain confides that "many of them have sought my counsel because they feel guilty . . . but when I ask them why, they say they feel bad because they haven't had a chance to fire their weapons".

One hardly needs to add that these marines know (or care) as much about Iraq as the warders of Abu Ghraib prison knew (or cared) about the Geneva Conventions. Not even the senior commanders speak a word of Arabic. Muslims are all just "hajjis". Iraq's religious differences are analysed thus: "Let a motherfucker use an American toilet for a week and they'll forget all about this Sunni-Shia bullshit."

<snip>

Now try to picture America 20 or 30 years from now, when these soldiers and their leaders are in power.

I haven't had my turkey dinne yet, and I'm ready to vomit.

until right after that last snip.
"Now try to picture America 20 or 30 years from now, when these soldiers and their leaders are in power."
:scared:

on leave from iraq. he grew up with my sons. i tried so hard to see things through his eyes, once blue, now brown. we cannot relate nor imagine the mind set of combat, of kill or be killed. they de-humanize the enemy in boot camp. alchohol released the boy i knew and he wept just as my vietnam vet comrades wept. there is no cure for the spirit of the warrior.