July 16, 2008
Another One That Arrived…
…in an email.
Enjoy. 
THIS IS ROUGH TO READ, BUT REALLY INTERESTING!
If you are language sensitive, don’t even bother to start reading. This country’s history never changes.
This is from a Reconnaissance Marine in Afghanista
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 them 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.
I dream of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his throat as I spit a bloody ear into his face and plunge my nickel plated Bowie knife through his frontal lobe. 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 and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins 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 or for each other or 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 others barbarism. Cavemen with AK47’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.
You wanna help? Buy Bonds America.
Saucy Jack
Semper Fidelis
A great big hat tip to Shana!
http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/wp-trackback.php?p=905
July 18th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
“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” Considering the
antithesis to Marine Corps Wargfighting Publication No.
3-33.5 “Counterinsurgency Field Manual”, Saucy Jack soundsd a trifle phoney. Yup
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/freezing.asp
July 21st, 2008 at 5:31 am
BB –
He could be.
However, I posted the email as exactly what it was, an email that appeared in my inbox, as I thought it pretty entertaining, not as an information venue.
THOUGH — while Snopes points out some geographic errors, they also allude to the fact that the narrative has been repeated and changed in the telling over the 7 years they say it has been out there, so who’s to know if the original wasn’t accurate? I also wonder about the dateline given by Snopes as far as such Marines operations in Afghanistan were concerned.
July 21st, 2008 at 6:35 am
Seth,
Scorpions are dormant below 40F, and most of us, as you recall, were issued standard bayonets. 2. Like most special ops forces, Marine recon personnel find themselves in remote forward areas: I know of a USAF S-ops NCO that spent years living with the locals (including some countries that are quite surprizing. While he was a gung ho type, he was, as is their nature and training, extremely close-lipped about those topics that fascinated my old English teacher..who, what, where, how, why, when.
Marines are saucy, but Jack overly so, IMHO. There were USMC types over there early on (I did some research as well), but that was the initial push &
rounding up prisoners, etc. The two areas which smack of polemics/hyperbole are the 1. incongruities of a
‘nickle plated bowie knife’ and the active snow scorpions.
(my psych teacher would label Jack as a classic inferiority complex). But I agree, the ‘letter’ has been around quite a few years and could certainly be based on some more circumspect original. Whatever its veracity, it is in many ways typical of the material we see on blogs, it appeals, reinforces, supports our
ideas,, er, well some of us. I tend to be a little sceptical and suspect you are also..it is interesting what goes around.
July 22nd, 2008 at 8:43 am
BB –
One way or the other, I enjoyed the read.
I actually have a close and old friend who talks that way, a retired NAVSPECWAR type who put in over 30 years and beaucoup ops (like the vet to whom you referred, he isn’t what you’d call overly forthcoming where details are concerned), so one never knows.