Killing America’s Kids (No Big Deal. Hey, They Breed Fast in Tennessee)
The 
web is covered in stink today because of a reporter for the Associated Press, Julie Jacobson, who photographed the death of a Marine whose legs had just been blown off. The kid was Joshua Bernard, a Lance Corporal of 21 years. When the photo appeared, Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense [sic] furiously tried to get the AP to quash the photo. It didn’t, to its everlasting credit. To quote one of many accounts on the web:
“Gates followed up with a scathing letter to Curley [of AP] yesterday afternoon. The letter says Gates cannot imagine the pain Bernard’s family is feeling right now, and that Curley’s ‘lack of compassion and common sense in choosing to put out this image of their maimed and stricken child on the front page of multiple newspapers is appalling. The issue here is not law, policy or constitutional right—but judgment and common decency.”
I thought a long time before writing about this matter, and was not pleasant to be around. The photo resonated with me, as we say. You see, long ago, in another pointless war, promoted by another conscienceless Secretary, I too was a Marine Lance Corporal of twenty-one years. I too got shot, though not nearly as badly as this kid, and spent a year at Bethesda Naval Hospital. At this point I am legally blind following my (I think) thirteenth trip to eye surgery as a result of an identical foreign policy.
Big deal. It happens. At this point I’m comfortable and doing fine. Don’t cry for me, Argentiana. The other kid is dead.
But that bothers me. And all of this perhaps gives me a certain insight into the matter that not all reporters have, nor all editors. It also makes me poisonously, bottle-throwing angry to think about another chilly professional bureaucrat, the Second Coming of McNamara, with less combat experience than Tinkerbell, sending kids to croak in weird places having nothing to do with the US.
But Gates. The words “decency” and “unconscionable” coming from him are fetid with hypocrisy. Gates was director of the CIA. “Intelligence” agencies are moral dirt, hated the world over for torture, murder, and destabilization of countries leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. The KGB, Mossad, CIA, STASI, SAVAK—they’re all the same. A man who presides over torture and murder should not speak of decency. He has none.
Nor is it easy to believe that Gates feels the slightest sympathy for the dead kid or for his family. If you don’t want kids to die in Afghanistan, don’t send them there. He does. How sorry can he be?
Why then is he so angry at having the war photographed? Easy: Spin control. Spin is so very important in war these days. While America is only barely a democracy, still, if the public, the great sleeping acquiescent ignorant beast, ever gets really upset, the war ends. The Pentagon is acutely aware of this. It remembers its disaster in Asia. The generals of today learned nothing military from Vietnam—they are fighting the same kind of war as stupidly as before—but they learned something more important: Their most dangerous enemy is the America public. You. Me. Defeating the Taliban isn’t particularly important, or even desirable. (No war means fewer promotions and fewer contracts). But while the Taliban cannot possibly defeat the Pentagon, the American public can.
Photographs are death to a war, boys and girls. They can asphyxiate a war faster than roadside bombs can even dream. Gates does not want the sprawling somnolent inattentive beast, the public, to see what his wars really are.
In wars, there are many enlightening things to see. For example, the Marine with a third of his face and half a lung, going ku-kuk-kuk as red gunch rolls out of his mouth and he drowns in his blood. Ruined or dying teenagers whimpering the trinity of the badly wounded, Mother, wife, and water. The brain-shot guy jerking like an epileptic as he tries not to die. Ever see brain tissue from gunshot? I have. It makes a pink spew across the ground. Like strawberry chiffon.
Gates does not want you to see this. You would puke, buy a bottle of bourbon, and take to the streets. He knows it. CBS could end these wars in a week if it aired what really happens. Gates cannot afford to let the dam break. PR is all. Thus Bush forbade the photographing of coffins coming home, and the CIA ferociously resists the publication of photographs of torture. Professional sadists do things to people that would make you gag.
Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking. In some three decades of covering the military, I saw this constantly. If I went to Afghanistan today as a correspondent, I could argue in private about the war with the colonel. If I suggested to the troops that they were being suckered, the colonel would go crazy. Next to keeping the public quiescent, keeping the troops (and potential recruits) bamboozled is vital. If a high-school kid saw what awaited, if he saw the cartilage glistening in wrecked joints, he wouldn’t sign.
Do I think that the press should publish such photos? Not yes but hell yes on afterburner. Every time an editor covers for the Pentagon, every time papers refuse to show the charred bodies still…slowly…moving, the dead children, the…never mind. The effect is to ensure that more kids will die the same way. And the press almost always does exactly this. We are a trade of whores and shills. Except that whores give value for money. The press kills our children.
Julie Jacobson sounds like that modern-day rarity, a reporter, as distinguished from a volunteer flack. Bless her. I used to wonder whether women could hack it as combat correspondents. I no longer do. (There are lots of them.) I used to refer to smarmy over-groomed bloodthirsty office warts as pussies, saying that they lacked balls. The anatomical reference no longer works. I note that Jacobson has more combat time than the aggregate for Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Obama, Biden, Gonzalez, Clinton, Perleman, Abrams, Kristol, Feith, Podhoretz, Krauthammer, George Will, Dershwitz, and Gates. These men, if the word is appropriate, killed that kid. Jacobson just caught them in the act.
More fun and frivolity available 24/7 at fredoneverything.net
Possibly related posts...
More Scurrilous Commentary by Fred Reed is available at http://www.fredoneverything.net | More from Fred Reed
Stumble It!
@24 – The world changes and people change. Anybody who has all the same opinions for 25 years is braindead. Funny is subjective.
For all you Fred fans, I suggest you read all his works going back 25 years. He’s morphed from a witty, pro-military, anti-feminist good old boy into a yet another self-loathing white liberal with little more than unfunny cynicism for his country (while he hides out in Guadalahara).
@jon#19. Come along Sir. I am not that difficult to read. And I do you a courtesy of reading all of yours, although so far you have added precisely nothing here. . I have tried to be pleasant but you persist in attacking the messenger. Give it a rest, there’s a good fellow.
@Chris#20.. Many thanks Sir.
@Post 17,
I’m sorry that you’re giving up after 45 years of MRA because you found one threat offensive. I’m also sorry that you will not visit MND any more to see if someone comment. Many times I was humiliated and wanted to give up, but decided to give another try and years went by.
A few monts ago TV reported that last surving British soldier of WW I had passed avay. He was over 100 years old. Montage of earlier films showed him walking among soldiers graveyard overseas. I don’t know the name but the poem “Flander’s Field” comes to mind. His comment was “Eight million men died, for what”? Then came WWII.
One soldier who died during the WW! wrote a poem “Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”. Wikipedia Link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulce_et_decorum_est_pro_patria_mori
I couldnt do it. i couldnt wait to see if he fell for the bait.
I do know how to spell LOKASHUS
Can I play?
Fred Reed comes on so strong, that when he comes on in the wrong direction it can reduce a man to mere growling. On this issue, I happen to mainly agree, but he can get under skin.
Amfortas on the other had sooths the skin, like an exfolient he leaves behind something smoother and softer, if stretched across a decent rip of intellectual muscle. I daresay its anathema to him to think in sentences of 100 words, let alone write comments that size. Pontificators R Us and the Queens English, where in the world do you think the term loquatious came from?
One little poke and out comes the straw man. I didn’t say anything about imposing a 100 word limit. I meant that using 1000 words to say what can be said in 100 is pointless. This type of writing is far more difficult to understand than it needs to be and takes too long to read. I do not believe I have ever seen on a message board or comments section posts that are as difficult to read as these. The posts are regular and it seems worse to not point out how inscrutable they are than to just continue skipping them.
@ paul #12: Your point is taken aboard, Paul and yes I do get frustrated and perhaps a tad florid at times. Put it down to passion. Please. At least you listened to the podcast. Thank you. Try recalling more pertinent matters and I will be happy to discuss them with you.
As for the syllogism remark, it is valid albeit hard, even if it offends you (not that I had you in mind). We have a new generation of young men amongst us who have not been schooled at all well. They have been agitpropped into anger and sometimes stupor by a feminised education system that has short-changed them. They might profess to use logic when there is no sign of it in what they write. And logic, while elevated to something sacred in thought is but one method of thought. Much of what passes for analysis is deduction and induction and sometimes poorly done. Then there is that wide and grey area where the vast majority of people try – and oftn fail – to reach simple plausibility.
I take your criticism aboard and will try to do better here. I hope you and your fellow personal critic jon do the same, even within jon’s desired imposition of a 100 word limit which for many matters is barely enough to get out a sound-bite or a criticism of a writer and does nothing to add to the subject matter. My syllogism and shit was just such a sound-bite. For shock value. It seems to have worked.
I have been a men’s rights activistist for well over 45 years. I have contributed to MND in the past. Seeing an article like this in MND
means that I will not be supporting MND in future, nor will I ever return to this web site again. If you want to read this filth then
you are welcome to it.
Fred Reed homepage Liink:http://www.fredoneverything.net/
Politico on AP photo, including Link to Fred Reed post on MND
http://www.politico.com/blogs/michaelcalderone/0909/Military_families_group_appeals_to_news_orgs.html#comments
” Then there are the enlisted men. In these hobbyist wars, and to an extent even in peacetime, it is crucial to keep the enlisteds from thinking.”
Your politics and take on world events aside (not the time nor the place for that debate) I take severe umbrage with your arrogance in this slice of tripe. I respect service, but don’t talk down to your audience. Some of us have our own Purple Hearts, our own takes on world politics, and our own way of reconciling our life philosophy with our professions. Keep the enlisteds from thinking? Are you out your mind? Not that the military doesn’t do a great many damaging things (like commissioning officers), but the only thing that keeps a man from thinking is himself. Some soldiers support the wars, some don’t, quite a few are ambivalent, but to pretend that the average grunt isn’t capable of thinking rationally about his place (lowly though it may be) is the sort of thing that would get you slapped if this conversation took place in my CP instead of the internet. You of all people should know that what motivates the soldier is never, ever, simple politics. It’s the primary combat unit, the team or squad. To explain away the sacrifices of the fallen as wasted because of the crimes of the CoC is to miss the entire point of what it is to be a soldier. The “cause” matters not a bit. “Country” is forgotten. The only honor in war is the opportunity to sacrifice for your brothers, and to gloss over that for the sake of political maneuvering or to make a societal point is a grave misstep. I understand the impulse to speak down to the civilians who haven’t experienced the same horrors that you have, I deal with it daily. But this sort of rampant moralizing is unbecoming and cheap. Your piece sounds like the work of a man who has spent his career expounding on the worst aspects of military info-starvation-fed conspiracy theorizing. Perhaps it’s a one-off for you, I truly hope so.
11B/2O-B4
There’ll be no justice for the war dead, on either side, until the reality of 9/11/2001 is dealt with.
Check out Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth to get the facts.
The Gulf of Tonkin incident was the catalyst for Vietnam. 9/11 was the catalyst for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, and an excuse to take away our civil liberties.
Good Article
If George Bush had to send his daughters, and the people on Capital Hill had to send their children, chances are we wouldn’t be there.
I am grateful for Reed’s perspective because it is one that I don’t have. Bernard’s fellow Marines were okay with going public with the picture, and I haven’t read if they said, “it’s okay with us, ask the family.” But it does bring up who gets to choose – is it indecent to release the photo because the family objects.
The father said, “America doesn’t need to see that.” I have the greatest sympathy for the father, who it appears was also a Marine, and Bernard’s family. So, I would tend to say that we need to respect the family’s wishes.
But maybe, America does need to see his son at the hour of his death. Maybe, Joshua isn’t only Mr. Bernard’s son, but the brother of his fellow Marines. Maybe Joshua is now our son, our brother, and someone who symbolizes all the “unknown soldiers”.
Maybe America needs to see how Joshua Bernard died – Not so America will give up a worthy fight, but so that we know the true cost of going after Al Quaida and other terrorist organizations. We need to protect our country. We need men and woman to put their lives on the line to do so. We need good people running the war and making sound decisions. We need to demand this of our leaders.
We need to see Joshua Bernard, so that Americans will honor the sacrifice the Marines make for us. So that Americans will fully fund VA hospitals. So that Americans will not gripe over the “GI Bill” or “veteran preference” in hiring.
We need to see Joshua Bernard so that we do not take for granted for one minute that we live in peace and security in a world in which terrorists are actively trying to destroy us – because our men and women at arms do their job. They do it everyday, they do it with good leadership and bad leadership. They do it and we need to keep the pressure on – not to give up or give in – but to have accountability, ensure that their ultimiate sacrifice, isn’t in vain.
I do not want to cause Mr. Bernard one more minute of grief and anguish, he does not need to see his son on the front of a newspaper. But his friends and neighbors, stangers and fellow citizens need to see this, so that we can honor him and all servicemen, and dedicate ourselves to holding our leaders accountable, so they make good decisions regarding the conduct of the war against a very real terrorist threat. That they make good decisions that balances the cost with the need. So that we firmly resolve not to give in or give up. And we resolve to be sure not to waste human life for the profits of private companies but to ensure that who serve in the military, are sacrificing their life and sacred honor for our county. And that we never, never forget them. Sempre Fi, may his memory be eternal. Kathryn J. Mahoney
I think Paul Elam is being a bit hard on Jon. I would not have thought this had I not listened to most of Amfortas’s podcasts. Here to the best of my recalling he says ‘most MRAs don’t know the difference between a pile of shit and syllogism’. That has the gist of it, though I have not gone back to check on the exact words used.
At best this show a certain contempt and at worst an arrogance.
Fred – (and Jon)
Disagreeing with a war doesn’t mean you’re right. Nor does agreeing with it. And for that matter, hindsight isn’t always 20-20. Was it the best thing we could have done? I don’t know.
America did what seemed the best thing, at the time. And somehow it kept us from being attacked on our own soil again. So like it or not, it sure seems to have worked for us.
P.S. amfortas? You’re one of my favorite windbags. I hope you bloviate even more often than you have. (yes John – I gave you another word to look up)
I am sure this piece by Fred will be wildly syndicated as he is a substantial journalist. Always when he writes on war and USA foreign policy he is at his most persuasive and insightful. One or two point do run through my mind.
The war in Afghanistan has been very bloody and running for about eight years. Yet this seems to be the first picture to emerge that show any of the horror of the conflict. I just wonder why it has taken so long.
Actually this is not such a surprise. It is well know that the most distressing pictures do not make it to the mainstream. Usually the brutality and gore are cut out. So it is a surprise that this picture ever saw the light of day at all. Also I think it is a reasonable bet that in comparison to those pictures we never get to see it is in fact tame.
May be we do need a military in case we ever have as it where a ‘real enemy’. On the other hand if what I read on LewRockwell is correct the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution regarded a standing army as a threat to liberty in itself.
Also as for the idea of a real enemy I thought we already knew who our real enemy is. I thought feminism and feminist where our real enemies. No military is going to protect me from them. So what’s the point of a military to protect my ‘freedom’ and property ( and so on) if these things have already been lost to feminism.
Of course the truth is I don’t really believe any military is really there to protect me. Rather it is there to protect the political system and concurrently the political elite. For sure I would be expected to die long before the elite at the centre came under any direct threat.
I always feel the sadness of all this is that people confuse ‘The Nation’ with the political establishment that control it. So we get what in fact may be self sacrificing and even noble sentiments hideously exploited.
@Jan
“amfortas – yes, you are a bit of a windbag.”
Untrue and inappropriate for this forum. Sir, please stay on topic and refrain from launching personal attacks like this. You clearly have the option of passing over any post you desire.
Jon, my apologies. My windbaggery is authentic. It’s just me, I’m aftaid. I talk this way. It is English. I would try to dumb-down for you; use shorter sentences; perhaps with semi-colons; or rap-speak. But your colon is of no interest to me, nor your rap on my knuckles (that’s a medical word for the knobbly bits of your fingers). The Editorial Guidelines call for raising up a little; using good English. Try to keep up, old son. Buy a dictionary and learn a new word every day. And perhaps resist going off-thread.
amfortas – yes, you are a bit of a windbag. This is the comments section of a website. We already know you’re smarter and better educated than us. Try to write something us lowly dogs can understand. Big/rare words cause more problems than they solve in this context:
Vale
Dictum
hubris
ignominiously
I’m not saying never use words I’ll have to look up, just that every time I ready anything you’ve written I get the impression you are trying to demonstrate superiority rather than say something.
Jon, did you say something?
Fred nails it on this one. It was the media images that got us out of Viet-Nam, inspiring the people to take to the streets raging against it.
I totally believe in maintaining a strong military in the event we need to fight a war that is not waged in the name of better commerce. Problem is, I am 52 and there hasn’t been one of those in my lifetime.
Amfortas – it takes you 1000 words to say what I could say in 100 and I am not a good writer. In this situation, less is more.
Such publicity is a double-edged sword, Fred. It can shine a light on the horror of war and the all-too-real effects on our soldiers (I have been in hot war too, thankfully unscathed). It can put us off needless military posturing and adventure but in doing so it can deter us from defending ourselves when we need to.
Open publicity with its horrific images has transformed the understandng of peoples and is but one of two major impacts which we would hope would force our Political-clown leaders to temper their hubris and greed and desire to dominate The other is the wounded. Once, not so long ago, our brave men would ‘do the decent thing’ (as far as the politicians want) and die ignominiously on the field. Now far fewer die than are returned, severely damaged, to live amongst us. Horrible wounds that previously would have carried a man off are now far more effectively dealt with by first-class rescue and hospitalisations. We have walking near-dead to tell the needed tales. Their stories must be told too. But they are few and far between.
Vale Fred; You may have no sight, but you see.
But the other edge, Fred. Just how do we maintain our resolve and fight where the ends are Good, essential and require willingness? Faint hearts are easily manufactured, just as hubristic ones are. And there are those who would reduce our resolve overall leaving us without the will to defend ourselves. Whose hand grips the sword?
We live in ironic times. The USA thinks it is going good by flexing its military muscle. Perhaps it is. I believe that, overall, America could be a benign force in the world. I was listeming to Admiral Keating, CinCPac the other day. He mentioned the last Great Single Power, Britain, which had a ‘Two Navy Dictum’. That is, it’s Navy was bigger than the next two biggest navies combined. It assured the security of British interests. He described Britain as ‘revolutionary’ in that it was the first, and so far only truely beingn Empire that mankind has ever known.
America does not have such a modest Dictum to measure itself and its needs, but has army, navy and air forces bigger than the whole of the rest of the world’s combined, several times over.
No-one could possibly defeat it in a conventional war.
Yet young men die needlessly on foreign soils where other men with plastic explosives in the roads overcome even this might, while the battlefield has changed to the Mind.
Fred is a huge improvement to this site. I’ve gotten used to MND being littered with high quantity, low quality writers and he isn’t that.
google “fred reed reimer” for the greatest article on american women I’ve ever read.
(I guess my other comment got deleted.)
I’ve been reading fred for years. I’m happy to see him here, he’s a huge improvement to this site.
I think this article:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/Reimer.shtml
is the most profound thing I’ve ever read about American women. I’ve had the luxury of working with a bunch of women from other countries and they are actually likeable. I was starting to wonder if I was a horrible stereotypical woman-hater or something but it turns out I just hate manipulative assholes. Women from other countries usually aren’t and that’s a wonderful thing. American women almost always are and that’s because they are spoiled rotten and deluded. bummer.