Two new pix from Afghanistan

W

Wallew

Moderator
My buddy blew through town and here are two pix he has allowed me to share with you.

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This is what 10,000 lbs of high explosives looks like exploding from 8 klicks away

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Here is my buddy firing an RPG7
 
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I just wish he would allow me to share more pix and some of the stories that go with them. Sometimes I wish I were twenty years younger. I would have loved to join him in Afghanistan, if only I were 31 and NOT 51.

To ALL our military AND CONTRACT military personnel:

THANK YOU FOR A JOB WELL DONE!
 
Well, he came, we PARTIED, he left.

Several gunsmithing buddies here in Denver gathered to eat BBQ, drink beer, smoke cigars and look at pictures and listen to his stories from Afghanistan and Iraq.

Let me just say that we are completely scr@wed in the Middle East. THERE will be NO PEACE. Kind of like Bosnia. We came, we saw, we left. WE DID NOT MAKE A DIFFERENCE THERE.

We will NOT make a difference in Iraq OR other middle east countries. Once we leave, it will revert to the way it's been for the past FIFTEEN HUNDRED YEARS.

AND the Iraqis only see us as INVADERS. Regardless of what we are being told on TV.

Just thought you should all know that.

Oh and one other thing. The saying in the middle east is:

"Boys are for fun, girls are for children" YECK!
 
Thank your buddy for us when you have a chance.

Is it at all surprising that we didn't make a difference with respects to the peoples' attitude? No. We can't impose our values & norms on an alien people. So, what have we done? We deposed one dictator and installed a new gubmint. We killed numerous terrorists over there as opposed to having to fight them here.
 
Have to disagree WE HAVE made a differnce according to my friend who is a major in IRAQ yeah it will always be a different culture over there but to say no difference is a bit extreme
 
swjr72,

Have to disagree WE HAVE made a differnce according to my friend who is a major in IRAQ yeah it will always be a different culture over there but to say no difference is a bit extreme
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NO OFFENSE. But my Dad, a WWII vet, sent me an email after I had forwarded several emails from my buddy. His statement was "The war I fought in was completely different, except for one thing. The officers were WORTHLESS THEN and apparently are still worthless NOW."

Sorry dude, but officers just don't see what the 'boots on the ground see'. They don't get out and 'mingle with the locals'.

4V50 G,

Messaged has been forwarded on. Thanks G.
 
We're certainly making a difference in Iraq, but it's unclear whether we're improving things or making them worse.

Time will tell, of course, but it appears we may be swapping a government by murderous thug with a strict islamic taliban-style government by murderous mob. The thug at least was somewhat tolerant of different religions and would sell oil. The Iranian mullahs who may take the reins are happy to murder all non-shiites and sit on the oil with their 7th-century lifestyle. Good times, indeed.

Iraq was a mistake from the beginning (or at least since 1990). We should have let them have Kuwait, then we would only have to deal with one thuggish pig (Saddam) instead of two (Saddam and the Kuwaiti chief).

Afghanistan is a different story. The talibans there deserved to get smoked after harboring al quaeda and osama, and just for being talibans. We got rid of the talibans and let the country go back to fighting tribe against tribe. The afghanis look forward to advancing their country into the 7th century. Now, I can't see what the goal is in afghanistan. Capture osama? That'd be good. But he's probably in Pakistan. So our Special Forces just train and advise the tribes. They're excellent soldiers, trainers, and even ambassadors, but in the end Afghanistan will not have changed. Still tribal.

Meanwhile, good pictures. I don't think my local rifle range would allow RPG's, but it looks like fun.

Regards.
 
SD,

Capture osama? That'd be good. But he's probably in Pakistan
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My personal opinion is he is in FRANCE, with a NO beard, short hair, living in a five star hotel. Meanwhile getting all the medical attention he needs for his condition of a failing liver (I think that's what he has).

As far as the rest, the 'people' (and I use that term loosely) will go RIGHT BACK to their third world, prehistoric lifestyle as soon as we leave.

Im Shallah.
 
Did your buddy ask any Kurds if there is a positive change in Iraq since US troops have been there? What about Chaldeans?

Sorry dude, but officers just don't see what the 'boots on the ground see'. They don't get out and 'mingle with the locals'.
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Things must have changed a lot since WWII....Every 80 year old guy I've talked to who fought the war as an enlisted man from a hole seems to be of the opinion that the "boots on teh ground" have a necessarily very narrow view of what's going on. Thank God communications were slower back then...we'd probably all be speaking Russian or Chinese otherwise...
 
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Here's a "boot on the ground" who thinks the US is making a difference in Iraq:
From an Iowa Town to Marine Corps Legend


U.S. Marine Corps First Sergeant Brad Kasal is an American hero. His story is a remarkable tale of bravery, sacrifice and savagery that adds another page to the great book of American military lore.

During his three tours of duty in Iraq and Kuwait, Kasal has been wounded multiple times, including being shot seven times, peppered with grenade fragments on several occasions, and wounded by shrapnel during the Iraqi invasion in 2003 and again last August during the Marines’ deadly street fights against Iraqi insurgents in the Sunni Triangle.





Kasal joined the Marine Corps in 1984 from rural Afton, Iowa - population 941 - when he was fresh out of East Union High School and fresh off the family farm. Nineteen years later, he was a Marine first sergeant leading a hard-pressed company of infantrymen in a desperate fight for an Iraqi city named Fallujah, a place as foreign to most Americans as Iwo Jima was sixty years ago.



“I always wanted to be a Marine, to see the world and make a difference,” Kasal said in an interview this week.



Linda Haner, the deputy city clerk of Afton and someone who watched Kasal and his family grow up, remembers him as a nice boy who did well on the high school wrestling team. “He was quite athletic,” she said.



Haner said the whole town is proud of Kasal and all his brothers who served in the armed forces. Brother Jeff is a retired Army paratrooper who fought in Desert Storm with the 82nd Airborne and now works in Iraq for Halliburton; Kelly, who was in the Army four years and Kevin, who served four years as a Marine, are all known and respected around the Iowa town.



“If you could see all the yellow ribbons and all the red, white and blue ribbons you would understand about this place. People around here are proud of the boys in the service and what they are doing,” Haner added.


Currently Kasal isn’t doing too much except recovering. The 38-year-old bachelor is confined to a wheelchair while he endures a painful medical procedure to put his right leg back together. His lower leg is connected to a metal device called a halo brace that is full of pins and screws that doctors manipulate each day to stretch his battered lower leg a millimeter at a time, trying to extend it to the length it used to be before an insurgent blew it in half with a Kalashnikov assault rifle.



“They turn the screws so many notches a day,” he explained matter-of-factly from his home in Oceanside, Calif. “It would be easier if I had someone to take care of me, but I have lots of friends and they help.”



Despite his terrible wounds, Kasal has no regrets. He has seen plenty of the world and made a world of difference to a lot of young Marines placed in his charge during three combat tours in the Middle East as First Sergeant of Kilo Company, and then Weapons Company, 3rd Battalion, 1st Marines. If he has his way he will be doing it again as soon as he heals.



“I believe in leading from the front,” Kasal explained. “It eases their [young Marines] minds and concerns to see me up their with them. That is where I belong.”



His father Gerald, a retired farmer and six-year veteran of the Iowa Army National Guard in the 1950s and early 1960s, said Brad was a great kid who never posed any problems except his propensity for fighting the boys from an adjacent town who seemed to take a pleasure in beating up the boys from Afton – a practice that came to an abrupt end when Brad and his brothers beat the hell out of some of them.



“After Brad and his brothers showed up a few times, they quit thinking they could beat up the boys from Afton,” Gerald Kasal remembered. “Brad’s oldest brother used to be a bully and pick on his younger brothers and I guess Brad just decided nobody was going to pick on him anymore.”



Whatever the reason for his bravery and resolve, Kasal displayed it in the proudest tradition of the Marine Corps on Nov. 13, 2004 during Operation Phantom Fury, the American attack on Fallujah that began five days earlier with the mission of destroying the insurgents’ stronghold in what was considered the center of their territory in Iraq.



“We were moving down the street, clearing buildings,” Kasal recounted. “A Marine came out wounded from a building and said there were three more wounded Marines trapped in there with a bunch of bad guys (insurgents). As we entered, we noticed several dead Iraqis on the floor and one of our wounded.”

Kasal said there was no question of what to do. “If I was a general I would still think my job was to get the wounded Marines out of there,” he said. “So we went in to get them.”



As soon as he entered the two-story stucco and brick building, Kasal found himself in mortal combat. It was fighting to the death, and there was no quarter expected or given, Kasal said.



“An Iraqi pointed an AK-47 at me and I moved back. He fired and missed. I shot and killed him. I put my barrel up against his chest and pulled the trigger over and over until he went down. Then I looked around the wall and put two into his forehead to make sure he was dead.”



While Kasal and a young Pfc. Alexander Nicoll were taking out the insurgent behind the wall, another one with an AK hiding on the stairs to the second floor began firing at the Marines on full automatic. “That’s when I went down, along with one of my Marines (Nicoll). Then I noticed the hand grenade.”



It was a green pineapple grenade, Kasal said. It flew into the room out of nowhere and landed near the two downed men. Kasal now believes that other Marines who were watching their back left the room for reasons he still doesn’t know and an insurgent was able to somehow get behind him.



Kasal said his first instinct was to protect the young Marine lying bloody beside him. He covered the young man with his body and took the full brunt of shrapnel to his back when the grenade exploded. Kasal’s body armor and helmet protected his vital organs but the shrapnel penetrated the exposed portions of his shoulders, back, and legs, causing him to bleed profusely.



“I took my pressure bandage and put it on his leg,” Kasal remembered. “Then I tried to put Nicoll’s pressure bandage on a wound on his chest but it is very hard to get a flak jacket off a wounded man and I was bleeding and fading in and out.”



Nicoll survived the grenade blast and his previous bullet wounds but lost his right leg. “An artery was cut and they had to amputate his leg,” Kasal said. “I have seen him and talked to him several times since we got back to the States. He is doing OK.”



The grenade blast stunned Kasal. He floated in and out of consciousness. But in the back of his mind a voice kept telling him he had to stay alert or the Iraqis were going to come back and finish him and Nicoll off. “They weren’t going to let us live if they knew we were alive. It was kill or be killed,” he said.



Kasal wrestled his 9mm automatic out of its holster and lay on the floor waiting for help. It was thirty or forty minutes before other Marines arrived.



“That’s when I got shot in the butt,” Kasal recalled. “It was the shootout at the OK Corral – point-blank range. I was lying there shooting and somebody shot me through both cheeks. It smarted a bit.”


Kasal did not know the exact extent of his wounds until much later; all he knew was that he was badly hurt. He was floating in and out of consciousness, ultimately losing 60 percent of his blood before he was rescued. After first aid, Kasal and Nicoll were transported to a field hospital in Iraq, then flown to Landstuhl, Germany, where Kasal was hospitalized for a week before arriving at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.



“I took seven rounds; five in my right leg, one in my foot and one to the buttocks area. When the grenade went off I got 30 to 40 pieces of shrapnel in my back,” Kasal said he later discovered.

Doctors are still fighting to save his leg, Kasal said. By the time this story appears, he will be back at Bethesda for more treatment, but the doctors won’t know for six months whether the Marine will every be 100 percent again. “I know I will walk again, but I don’t know if I will fully recover.”



Meanwhile Kasal experiences almost constant pain.



“I'm missing four and a half inches of the fibula and tibia bones,” he said. “They put that halo brace on my leg to try and make the bone grow together. But there’s no guarantee that will work.”



Despite everything that has happened to him, Kasal still believes America’s mission is Iraq is both important and terribly misconstrued. He harbors special venom for the so-called “mainstream” media reporters who portray the war as a failure and American policy as a gross mistake. He says he has heard reporters say their job is to make President George W. Bush and his policies seem a failure.



“The insurgents are oppressing normal people,” Kasal said. “The press never reports the good things. When we open a school or fix a sewer, the things that make normal Iraqis happy, they never report it. There are plenty of Iraqis, thousands of them, who want to live normal lives. If we can help them it will be all right. The people just want peace and freedom.”
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Can you imagine how fast the US would have pulled out of Europe if today's media were around in December 1944 with instant spin and immediate casualty figures from the Ardennes campaign? Hitler's last-ditch offense in the West would have worked, and we would have had a negotiated peace with Germany and the Russians may have kept right on going all the way to the Atlantic. Not to mention the fact that there were more than a few French people (especially if they had a little money) who thought life was better under the German occupation prior to Operation Cobra.

US casualties after the Ardennes offisive were something like: 81,000, with 19,000 killed. That's a 19, with 3 zeros. And that's after ONE battle. And this is not "ancient" history like Pickett's Charge. There are sill a lot of guys who were THERE that you can talk to. And we would NOT have lost the war if we would have pulled out of Europe before this offensive. Same think with the Battle for Tarawa. All those Marines killed for an airstrip that we did not need and could have easily isolated. It was not necessary like Iwo Jima was. Given today's media, I don't think we could sustain the public opinion necessary to win a war under those circumstances even if insurgents were setting off a bomb a day in the US. Todays media could have easily "spun" us right out of WWII and let the Russians have just about all of Europe.

FrankDrebin, . . . thank you.

May God bless,
Dwight
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Yer welcome, and you too!!
 
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Every 80 year old guy I've talked to who fought the war as an enlisted man from a hole seems to be of the opinion that the "boots on teh ground" have a necessarily very narrow view of what's going on
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That may be normal boots on the ground. Perhaps Spec ops see things differently. Perhaps not, I just don't know.

As a Staff Sgt in Iraq my buddy said that we have made a difference. The only problem is that once we leave, it will go back to the same old ways.

IF we could advance them into the 19th or 20th century, then OK MAYBE. But think BOSNIA, where we 'made a difference'. They are NOW killing each other just like they used to.

This is what will happen in Middle East as soon as we 'pull out'.

Are Kurds better off? Compared to Sadaam, probably so. Compare to others, I am unsure, as I did NOT ask for a Kurdish history lesson, just his overall impressions after being in Afghanistan AND Iraq.

Just passing on what he said. Perhaps because he's in his mid thirties, he is a bit more skeptical than most. I don't know why he said what he did, just that is what he said.
 
IF we could advance them into the 19th or 20th century, then OK MAYBE. But think BOSNIA, where we 'made a difference'. They are NOW killing each other just like they used to.
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We should probably pull out of Detroit too.....As far as making a difference, the majority Shiites can now actually vote for a Shiite and not be taken away in the middle of the night. Isn't that different? I can't imagine being a Republican and being kidnapped and tortured for not voting for Hillary Clinton.....
 
Pull out of Detroit?

Hey, Our Mayor is not some corrupt thug who siezed power by killing his opponents. No, Our Mayor is a legally and democratically elected corrupt thug. There's a difference. :rolleyes:

Anyway, Iraq is a problem that we may not be able to pull out of. (quagmire?) If we pull out, the government formed by the majority shiites will be attacked by the still-better-armed-and-trained sunnis. So the shiites will bring in their religious allies, the Iranians. And none of them will be so nice as to avoid damage to holy mosques.

Then, to avoid all that oil going somewhere else, Turkey will swoop in to "save" the Kurds. and the oil.

To keep Iran from gaining too much power, Syria and Saudi Arabia will invade on the side of the Sunnis. Which will annoy the Wahabi mullahs in Saudi so they'll start an uprising of their own.

So we better not leave just yet.
 
We should've focused on fixing our own house before someone else's, but now that we're there, we'd damn well better stay there until things have settled down. If they settle down.
 
Hey, Our Mayor is not some corrupt thug who siezed power by killing his opponents. No, Our Mayor is a legally and democratically elected corrupt thug. There's a difference.
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What happened to the Go-Go dancer who was mysteriously homicided to death after the "Party That Never Was"????
 
What happened to the Go-Go dancer who was mysteriously homicided to death after the "Party That Never Was"????
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Are you talking about the one who wasn't going to talk about not doing anything at a function that never happened?

Never heard of her. I don't know. I wasn't there. It never happened. There was no party. Ask any of the guests, they'll all deny it.

The evidence is as well-hidden as Iraq's WMD's or Saddam's billions. It's all there, we just don't know where to look. The sunnis know where it's hidden, they're just biding their time until we leave. Then this nickle-dime terrorism will stop and the real storm begins.

Regards.
 
Are you talking about the one who wasn't going to talk about not doing anything at a function that never happened?
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That's the one....You should consider moving out of state....Jennifer was on some radio show and she said she totally trusts Kwame's judgement and often gets advice from him.
 
Our Governess Jennifer Granholm is a product of former Wayne County Executive McNamara's Democratic political machine, the same machine that produced Mike Duggan, ex prosecutor, ex head of "People Who Care About Kids", a group formed with the sole purpose of defeating the "shall issue" ccw. That whole crew is pretty much corrupt, appointing cronies, soliciting contractor kickbacks, etc.

But Jennifer is smart, too smart to need any advice from Kwame. The only thing she wants from Detroit is that block of minority votes that keeps her in office.

On the county voting map, Michigan was pure red, with a big blue spot for Detroit, and a couple of small blue spots for Ann Arbor and Marquette. That was enough to carry the Dems to local victories. And turn the state blue.

Hey, this thread got evicted to the Political forum, just for a couple of Detroit-bashing threads. Sort of lost the original focus on those pics from Afghanistan, getting diverted to S.E. Michigan via Baghdad.

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Enough of picking on Democrats and Detroit ...
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By the way, I've seen the story of Sgt Kasal (that you posted a few days ago) in a few forums now. I'm hoping its a true story and not just some made-up web fable. It pretty much looks real, since some of the sources are "newsy" web sites.

That is a truly inspiring story, a Sgt literally putting his ass and the rest of his back side in harms way to protect a fellow (and junior) Marine. It's a story that will certainly join a million other stories that make up the Marine character and mystique.

But it was character, training, and loyalty to his crew that probably made his decision easy and reactive, didn't have to think once, much less twice. He would have done the same in any theater of war, regardless of the justification of the general mission. It doesn't however have any bearing on whether the Iraq war was started justly or un-justly. Nor any bearing on whether we'll make a positive difference there in the long run.

It's funny (odd, not haha) to think that the war started in 1990 under Gearge HW Bush. Almost 15 years ago. With varying amounts of heat and simmer. And my dim recollection is that Saddam asked a U.S. diplomat if the U.S. would mind him invading and taking over Kuwait. She said "no problem", and look where we are now.

Well, that's a lot of typing, and my beer is getting warm...
 
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