How's YOUR "Morale?"

Anna Nicole Smith. There, we’ve got that out of the @$%&$#! way. And, I hope, Princess Diana. And Chandra Levy. And Laci Peterson. And Natalee Holloway.

Well, I DO know that the Super Bowl is over, but there’s always—anyway it seems so—pro basketball. Kobe What’s-His-Name and Shaq are still stuffing balls furiously through a hoop, aren't they?. Somebody must be about to set some kind of record for something. The excitement is . . . bearable. Very, very bearable.

In, of course, lesser news, we have now lost three thousand, nine hundred and ten (3,910) soldiers and “civilian contractor” military in Iraq, five hundred and twenty nine (529) in Afghanistan. Thirty eight thousand, five hundred thirty eight (38,538) of our soldiers have been wounded. Johns Hopkins says—actually, nobody in the U.S. counts (not that important)—Six hundred, fifty-five thousand (650,000) Iraqis are dead, and I guess only god knows how many wounded and maimed for life. In Iraq, they’ll probably die soon, too. Not, of course, that it’s all that important to you.

You want to know whose sperm beat all the rest up Anna Nicole’s love canal, right?

Well, if you’re lucky, Nancy Grace will soon have all the names of the contenders; and, of course, she’ll read the list for a couple of weeks. So will Greta Van Susteren. Then there’s Bill O’Reilly, and you probably know the names of a couple more. I don’t watch that much TV, these days.

In even lesser news—not really anything new, really—the U.S. Congress goes on bungling and dithering. Obviously, they’re not all that eager to get in the way of Mr. Bush and his killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. They’re posturing and primping— they're calling it "debate" on that “resolution” to censure—and they’ll get around to really doing something one of these days. Like I said, it’s just not that important.

Then there’s news from the southern border—thousands, maybe tens of thousands (nobody’s counting there, either)—of Mexican and South American criminals of every make, model, and description pouring into the country, bringing with them half or more of the diseases known to man.

And, of course, the Congress is dithering about all that, too. Not that important.

If you try to sneak a plant or some fruit into the U.S., of course, they’ll fine hell out of you, and of course, we’re spending millions to prevent stray cattle from sneaking across the river. Not a damned one makes it, either. That’s important (figure that one out).

That’s about it – unless Nancy Grace’s list of possible daddies for Anna Nicole’s kid includes a couple congressmen (and, things being what they are in Washington, it sounds like the odds in favor of that are pretty good, doesn’t it?).

When I say you make me sick, my country, there will perhaps be a few who know why and forgive me.

As I said, I don’t watch TV much. Well, actually, I’ve been watching the dogfights series on the history channel. That’s interesting. It’s interesting in that the other night, it was confided that because the Japanese had a fighter, the KI-84 Hayate (never good at foreign languages, we called it “Frank”) was considerably better than our fighters, including the P-47 and the P-51, the brass-hat military kept it to themselves. It’s still hard to find out what our kill ratio was vis a vis the Hayate (it means gale or hurricane).

Then, too, the series has disclosed (actually, I knew, but now I have a different interest), that the Russian-built MIG-15 was better than our jets over Korea, including the F-86 Sabrejet. Soviet pilots shot down over 1,300 UN aircraft of all types while losing only 345 of their own. 16 Soviet pilots made ace, with the top scorer being Yevgeni Pepelyaev with 23 kills. Against U.S. jets, the Soviets shot down two for every one they lost. O-o-o-o-ps!

Now, the interesting part of that is that our media consistently reported throughout that particular “intervention” and until only recently that our pilots were shooting down MIGs at the rate of fifteen to one. The truth is that we were sustaining heavy losses, statistics being doctored every way possible. When, for instance, a U.S. jet crash-landed or was found to be damaged beyond repair after combat, we found a way to write it off as wear and tear or the like.

Back home, we were also being told repeatedly that the F-86 was the better airplane, while everyone over MIG Alley knew better. The Soviet pilots were so good against our B-29s, in fact, that we first switched from day to night bombing, then stopped bombing with B-29s altogether. Too many losses.

That state of affairs, strangely enough, continued right into the Vietnam War. There, the folks back home were told, our pilots were scoring at a five to one ratio. The truth was that we were losing two fighters for each one we shot down. Oddly enough – unless you’re moi – the disparate numbers were this time attributed not to “wear and tear,” but to losses inflicted by SAM missiles. When the situation had gotten so bad – we were being out-turn-and-burned by thirty year old MIG-17s – that a fighter school, Top Gun, was established.

We started teaching our pilots to fight, in other words. We were also told that once our guys went to school, the ratio of losses to kills improved remarkably. I happen to know better, and a look at the records now published by both sides is not the only reason. I did covert operations of my own against the propagandists, as you may recall.

Neither has history been kind to U.S. military operations otherwise. Now, of course, we’ve been told about troops who broke and ran in Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. The Mayaguez Incident, Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue hostages in Iran, and dozens of incidents during the war in Vietnam are matters of record – now.

In the Mayaguez Incident, 14 Marines were killed, two Navy corpsmen were killed, and two Air Force crewmen were killed. Counting 23 airmen killed during preparations for the raid, 41 U.S. servicemen lost their lives. Thirty-five Marines and 6 airmen were wounded. Three hundred, twenty troops participated. Not only were three U.S. Marines left behind on an island after the battle, two of whom were subsequently executed by the Khmer Rouge while in captivity. Nevertheless, the Marine Corps has yet to admit that the three Marines were left behind on the island, and none of the three men has received any posthumous award for their heroism in defending the flank of the Marine position during the disastrously planned attack.

If that weren’t enough, the merchant crew whose seizure at sea prompted a US attack had, unbeknownst to the US Marines, the whole time been released in good health before the Marines attacked. Another of those “Oopses.”

Operation Eagle Claw, originally Operation Evening Light—U.S. military operations are invariably given vaingloriously macho names (Operation Urgent Fury, Just Cause, Iraqi Freedom, Enduring Freedom are just some)—was a United States military operation to rescue 53 hostages from the U.S. embassy in Tehran, Iran on April 24, 1980.

The “Op” was, in the words of one U.S. Navy Seal advisor, a “goatfuck.” When an unforeseen(!!!!) sandstorm caused two of eight helicopters to get lost, and a third helicopter pilot seized the opportunity provided him by a faulty rotor blade sensor to chickened out, the mission was aborted. Unfortunately, a large part of the mission force was already at Desert One, the operation assembly point in Iran. “High and dry,” you might say.

After having decided to abort the mission, a helicopter somehow (haste has been suggested) lost control while evacuating the landing site and crashed into a C-130 transport. In the ensuing explosions and fire, eight US servicemen were killed. During the evacuation, six helicopters were left behind and intact (maybe “haste” wasn’t too far off?).

The six helicopters now serve with the Iranian Navy.

In their efforts to “haul ass,” aircrews not only left behind classified plans that identified a number of CIA operatives in Iran, but one special forces trooper who had infiltrated in order to do reconnaissance prior to the mission was obliged to escape Iran by walking out. Dick Meadows was a hell of a trooper.

In October, 1983, on the premise that college medical students there needed rescue after a coup by a leftist Deputy Prime Minister, the U.S. invaded the island of Grenada. Operation Urgent Fury turned out to be what one member of the high command termed “a learning experience.”

A former Seal I happen to know called it “another U.S. clusterfuck.”

Most likely undertaken in order to divert attention from President Reagan’s decision to “cut and run” (sound familiar?) from Lebanon after the suicide bomber attack that killed 242 U.S. Marines there, the initial invasion involved 1,900 troops, including Army Rangers, Marines and Navy Seals, and was to remain still another example of similar US interventions, right down to the un-necessary losses. In less than three days, 19 US servicemen were killed and 116 wounded—as many as thirty percent of whom were victims of friendly fire, miserable planning, and asinine organization.

In point of lugubrious fact, almost everything that could go wrong with Operation Urgent Fury did. A Navy SEAL reconnaissance mission floundered in heavy seas and four drowned. The SEAL mission was a total failure. Airborne troops missed their drop zones when their lead C-130 got lost. Ranger units unable to communicate with each other directly had to transmit messages by way of Air Force communications. Once on the ground, the troops couldn’t find the students they were supposed to rescue.

When Rangers who originally expected to land at the island’s airfield discovered that their prospective enemy had set up runway obstacles, they decided to jump from 500 feet altitude. Like the SEALS, many, if not all of the Rangers wore double loads of gear, and were obliged to refit for the assault in the aircraft and on their way to the DZ. When the Air Force refused to conduct the mass parachute drop requested by the Rangers, a squabble ensued – during the operation(!).

Think that’s bad? At one point, Cuban machine-gunners pinned down SEALs assaulting the Grenadan Governor-General’s mansion. Two American gunships were flying overhead, but thanks to more ingenious planning and co-ordination, the men on the ground were unable to communicate directly with the planes. As a result, a SEAL placed a long distance phone call from the mansion to Fort Bragg, N.C and requested fire support. Miraculously, he got it.

For a time, it looked as though wounded would have to wait for evacuation— because the Navy wouldn’t let the Army helicopter pilots land on U.S. Navy ships!

(“Not qualified!”)

And so on. The fact is that the U.S. came damned close to a major defeat due to poor planning typical of senior officers. Maybe a bloviating media pundit said it best: “The Americans overcame poor planning and overwhelmed the defenders with mass, speed and firepower.”

Yeah, right . . .

Bad? Operation Just Cause was worse, an example of planning so bad you’d inevitably think I was lying were I to recite it all. So, I’ll just mention this: The Americans lost 18 soldiers, four SEALs and two Marines killed in action and 325 wounded. The argument will go on for a while yet (like the air wars in Korea and otherwise, the truth only comes out after everyone involved has gone mas allá) concerning how many Panamanians we killed. A former U.S. Commission of Inquiry, an independent one headed by former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, estimated that there were more than three thousand Panamanian civilian casualties.

Like I said in the instance of Iraq, they’re not important, anyway. “We’d have killed more if we’d tried” (remember SecDef Rumsfeld’s “humanity” spiel?).

Are you wondering who the Anna Nicole Smith was back when we “Just Caused” Panama and Manuel Noriega?

As in the case of Grenada and others, we’ll hear the truth after a while – quite a while. Just to give you insight, though, the Pentagon started off with an estimate of fourteen. That grew to two hundred, then to three hundred. A year or so ago, I saw another estimate, five hundred. We’re getting there.

And the cause was just. Manuel Noriega, whom we were after and brought back here for trial, got out of jail just the other day. Don’t ask me how you legally try the head of another state here in the U.S. What makes you think the law makes any difference? George Herbert Walker Bush, the president then – history does repeat itself, it seems – probably issued one of those “signing letter.” The law is for other people, not guys named Bush. Makes you wonder why we went through all that monkey business with Saddam, doesn’t it? Why one guy here, and another guy there?

Anyway, there you have it – what we said at the time, what we said much later, and what the facts actually were. When you corner anyone responsible for all that lying, he will invariably tell you it was for your own good. The nation and the soldier’s morale. Check with FoxNews, any night. Not long ago, the time before the elections, the White House’s lead propagandists were insinuating—Hannity came right out and argued it—that voting for Democratic Party candidates would be damaging for our troops morale.

The truth is bad for morale. Sure. Now, nevertheless, the question is—the history of our government’s veracity during any of these undeclared wars having been what it is—what in hell is it that makes you believe anything you’re being told now about Iraq and Afghanistan is the truth?

“Our military is doing magnificently.” “Our equipment is superior, and we’re kicking ass.” Like I said, check with FoxNews, any night. Our planning has been meticulous and unerring, too. Hell’s bells, there for a long time, our President couldn’t remember having made any mistakes (“mission accomplished”). Now, when you’ve gone back and read about the Hayate and the P-51s, the MIGs and the Sabrejets, the Mayaguez and the Kmer Rouge, and so on, think about Iraq and Afghanistan.

And I repeat - how much of the truth do you think we’re getting? And how’s your morale?