If you don't support the war in Afghanistan, you shouldn't be going there. The last thing that our brave fighting men that are risking their lives need is some malcontent among them to lower their morale. I certainly hope that you don't speak like this to your fellow soldiers while you are serving in uniform.
Cripes. Did we even read the same post?
I left Afghanistan three months ago, and it pretty much
is a fiasco. We, the only superpower remaining on the planet, have been reduced to begging, hat-in-hand, our NATO allies for troops, air assets, and various other war materiel. I once personally had to issue British 5.56mm ammo to some of our guys because we couldn't get any American ammo on short notice. We don't have enough helicopters or fighting vehicles, and we certainly don't have enough troops. Casualty levels in Afghanistan have now surpassed Iraq.
Neither Afganistan nor Iraq is a "war" in the conventional sense. Both are open-ended counterinsurgency operations, for which the American military was originally poorly equipped and poorly trained.
I am not a malcontent, and neither is the major. But we've seen this with our own eyes, and not just through the lens of a bunch of cheering conservative talk show hosts.
Did you think that you would only have to possibly deploy to conflicts that you personally approved of?
I re-upped, too, though I won't do so again. Nonetheless, if ordered to Iraq - a "war" I personally oppose - I would certainly obey my orders. My approval or disapproval is irrelevant, while my oath is completely relevant. But while I wear the uniform for the next few months, I do what I am told.
I guess you must believe in a sort of fascist type of military dictatorship, where people are unable to express their opinions?? What an absolute cop out by you, your comment is.
I have read all sorts of crap posted on various gun forums about what is supposedly happening in the Middle East. A large portion of it is exactly that: crap. The major is looking for info based on observed reality, not conjecture or, more commonly,
what gun people want to believe is happening in the Middle East.
As an example, until I deployed, I
almost believed that every soldier in theater was screaming for a 1911 and an M14, and that M9s and M4s were total POSs that no one wanted to carry. It turned out to be mainly crap promulgated by gun magazines to increase sales, and on gun forums by shooters biased toward old-technology guns.
So perhaps you can understand why some of us take with a grain of salt the info offered up by people who have never been in theater.
