Knee Deep in the Hooah!

Fewer things in life must be more fun than sticking soldiers under a shell and shifting them around at will. Of course it’s easy to do when you have no vested interest in their mission — after all the current Administration has taken every opportunity to ensure the American people that it has never once supported this mission in any way, shape or form… oh but they support the troops… riiiiiight.

These are not faceless and nameless people. These are men with families. One of them is MY family. Read the excerpt below and then go to Mudville Gazette to read the entire article. You must, but take a deep breath first.

Diversions (III)

Greyhawk

Remember the Iraq drawdown you heard about last month? The one where a Brigade originally scheduled for Iraq was going to Afghanistan instead? Well, a funny thing about that…

Last weekend we noted this obscure bit of news from ABC:

Gen. Odierno will receive a Stryker Brigade to replace the incoming replacement brigade diverted to Afghanistan just a week ago. That means that he will continue to maintain the current level of two Stryker brigades in Iraq.

While that story might be obscure, it’s anything but insignificant. The diversion of the Stryker Brigade (one of two that were then scheduled to replace the two currently in Iraq) to Afghanistan made headlines as the President appeared at Camp Lejeune to announce his Iraq drawdown and Afghanistan “surge”. As noted here at the time, that followup report – if accurate – “exposes everything you’ve heard about troop deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan over the past two weeks as an absolute hoax on the American public.”

Read the first entry in this series for details of the preparations made by the Stryker Brigade for an Iraq deployment – 10-month Arabic language schools being just part of the training rendered useless by a reassignment to a country where the locals don’t speak it.