A MARINE'S VIEW

A MARINE'S VIEW OF WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON.....

 

Message from a Recon Marine in Afghanistan :  This young man is  articulate and has a flare for colorful language, and descriptive prose... Scorpions, Chiggers & Sand Fleas/great letter, must read!

 

From the Sand Pit...  

It's freezing here.  I'm sitting on hard cold dirt between rocks and shrubs at  the base of the Hindu Kush Mountains , along the Dar'yoi Pomir River, watching a hole that leads to a tunnel that leads to a cave.  Stake out, my friend, and no  pizza delivery for thousands of miles.

I also glance at  the area around my ass every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion  sting.  I've actually given up battling the chiggers and sand fleas, but the  scorpions give a jolt like a cattle prod. Hurts like a bastard.  The antidote  tastes like transmission fluid, but God bless the Marine Corps for the five  vials of it in my pack.

The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that, believe it or not, they are human beings, which  means they have to eat food and drink water. That requires couriers and that's  where an old bounty hunter like me comes in handy.  I track the couriers, locate  the tunnel entrances and storage facilities, type the info into the handheld,  shoot the coordinates up to the satellite link that tells the air commanders where to drop the hardware.  We bash some heads for a while, then I track and  record the new movement.

It's all about intelligence.  We haven't even brought in the snipers yet. These scurrying rats  have no idea what they're in for.  We are but days away from cutting off supply lines and allowing the eradication to begin.  But you know

me, I'm a romantic.   I've said it before and I'll say it again:  This country blows, man.  It's not  even a country.  There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no  government.  This is an inhospitable, rock pit shit hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes.  There are no jobs here, like we know jobs.

 

Afghanistan offers  two ways for a man to support his family:  join the opium trade, or join the army.  That's it.  Those are your options.  Oh, I forgot, you can also live in a refugee camp and eat plum-sweetened, crushed beetle paste and squirt mud like a goose with stomach flu, if that's your idea of a party.  But the smell alone of those  'tent cities of the walking dead' is enough to hurl you into the poppy fields to cheerfully scrape bulbs for eighteen hours a day.

I've been living  with these Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmen. and even a couple of Pushtuns, for  over a month-and-a-half now, and this much I can say for sure:  These guys, all  of 'em, are Huns... actual, living Huns... They LIVE to fight.  It's what they do.  It's ALL they do.  They have no respect for anything, not for their families, nor  for each other, nor for themselves.   They claw at one another as a way of life.  They play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor.  Huns, roaming packs of savage, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism.  Cavemen with AK-47's.  Then again,  maybe I'm just cranky.

 

I'm freezing my ass off on this stupid hill because my lap warmer is running out of juice, and I can't recharge it until the sun comes up in a few hours. Oh yeah! You like to  write letters, right?  Do me a favor, Bizarre.  Write a letter to CNN and tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling  the Taliban 'smart.' They are not smart.  I suggest CNN invest in a dictionary  because the word they are looking for is 'cunning.'  The Taliban are cunning, like jackals, and hyenas, and wolverines.  They are sneaky and ruthless, and when  confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites, who create nothing,  and destroy everything else.  Smart.  Pfft.  Yeah, they're real smart.

They've spent their  entire lives reading only one book (and not a very good one, as books go), and  consider hygiene and indoor plumbing to be products of the devil.  They're still  figuring out how to work a Bic lighter. Talking to a Taliban warrior about  improving his quality of life is like trying to teach an ape how to hold a pen;  eventually he just gets frustrated and sticks you in the eye with it.  OK,  enough.  Snuffle will be up soon, so I have to get back to my hole.  Covering my  tracks in the snow takes a lot of practice, but I'm good at it.

 

Please, I tell you and my fellow Americans to turn off the TV sets and move on with your lives.  The  story line you are getting from CNN and other news agencies is utter bullshit, and designed not to deliver truth but rather to keep you glued to the screen through the commercials.  We've got this one under control.  The worst thing you  guys can do right now is sit around analyzing what we're doing over here,  because you have no idea what we're doing, and really, you don't want to know.  We are your military, and we are doing what you sent us here to do.

 

Saucy Jack 

Recon Marine in Afghanistan 

Semper Fi 

"Freedom is not free... but the U.S. Marine Corps  will pay most of your share". 

Send this to YOUR FRIENDS so that people here will  really know what is going on over there