Okay, I considered putting this one in the pit since it may turn ugly. If it does, I don’t mind if the mods move it there.
This past weekend I was talking with a friend of mine. The guy is ex-army and maintains that all persons serving in the armed forces from the beginiong of the Clinton administration until now hate Bill Clinton with a passion.
He illustrated this by claiming that whenever Clinton appeared on a military base, he was so afraid of the troops that they had to remove the bolts from their rifles.
Is this even vaguly true? Did Clinton trust our troops so little that he had to disarms them in his presence? Or is it just an urban legend.
Tell your friend that he’s full of shite. The military friends I have didn’t have much love for Clinton, but that never happened.
There’s this little thing in the military called “discipline”. To have soldiers remove their bolts for fear that one of them might assassinate the President?!? Even to imply that a step like that would be necessary is an insult to military personnel.
Good thing none of these troops were fit young males trained in unarmed combat to kill people then. Because then they could have performed the asssassination without weapons. :rolleyes:
Well if you were to believe Senator Jesse Helms, Clinton was so unpopular on North Carolina military bases that he had “better watch out” and “have a bodyguard” were he to visit. Remarks made on the anniversary of JFK’s assassination, as I recall.
The military utterly denounced the remark and the Secret Service investigated the threat, meanwhile the Republicans kept him on for over 6 more years as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Which is not to say that Republicans in Congress have a history of sweeping unpleasantries under the rug.
Firstly anyone who tries to generalize about “all persons serving in the armed forces” is going to be very inaccurate from the get go, so your friend is sorely misinformed. The military is more conservative than liberal, but there are still many Democrats in the military. And there’s many Democrat politicians currently in the House or Senate that served in the military in some capacity.
Second, the idea that there was a credible threat of members of the armed forces assassinating the President on a visit to a military base is so far beyond the realm of the real that I’m almost stunned it is even brought up.
Well, as I said I really didn't know where to put this one. As whacked out as my friend's story sounded I have tried to track down ANY citation confirming or denying it.
No luck. I am begining to belive that this is a story that he picked up on a message beard somewhere and fell for it because, he himself hates Clinton, and because the person telling the story claimed to be active duty military.
I wasn’t complaining about the question, Sweetums, it’s a question that can be answered factually. I was complaing about the way RTA answered your question with a swipe at the Republican party.
I was leaving the active duty military and joining the national guard just as Clinton was becoming president. There was a feeling of dread in the military when he was elected. I remember joking about how I was glad to be getting out now that he was president. There certainly was no talk of him not being safe with the military. I don’t know if it is army wide but most SOPs for storing weapons that I have worked under call for the bolts and weapons to be stored separately. That is for storage only. When the soldier is issued a weapon he gets the whole thing. Soldiers don’t walk around with their weapons all the time and unless it is in a combat zone they won’t have ammo except on a controlled range. I don’t see how there would need to be a change in policy even if there was some perceived problem. Anyone who had a loaded weapon on base during a presidential visit would be doing so against existing orders. No reason to make any changes.I think your buddy was passing on a GI Rumor which is a subset of urban legends.
FWIW, I have a number of friends who were active military during the Clinton administration. Some of them liked him, some of them didn’t like him, but all of them made it very clear that as soldiers in the armed forces they were basically told “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” - the President (whoever he may be) is the commander in chief and soldiers don’t usually go around publicly criticizing the chain of command.
I left out MPs because I thought that went without saying, although many posts are now using DOD police (civilian federal employees) for their police force. Maybe all of them do now, I’m not on active duty now so I only have direct knowledge of a few bases.
As for guard duty, most of the time I didn’t have any ammo although I had my bolt. I’m talking mostly pre-911. During Desert Storm I was stationed in Germany and we had multiple guard mounts going at once. We had credible intelligence about terrorist activities in Europe along with pictures and known vehicles of suspected terrorists. We carried weapons but no ammo. The Sergeant of the Guard had some ammo locked up in the guard shack. In fact we had one housing area that we had to patrol which was in the middle of a German community. There was no fence or security at all. We couldn’t even have weapons and we were about 45 minutes away from the nearest MP. The best we could do was call the Politzei. After 911 when we were tasked to guard the bridges and tunnels of NYC I was actually surprised that they allowed us to have ammo. It was the first time I had ammo while on a guard detail. I do know that those who guarded weapons or ammo supply points were fully armed. I never pulled that detail.
Anyone that has served in the American military during the ‘Clinton Years’ probably can tell you the million or so rumors that were spread about Clinton. I heard about the lack of salutes when he was passing by, that some modifications were done to the way certain customs were handled. I heard about during certain balls/functions Hilary Clinton would not allow military members near her. All lies, I would guess. But they sure spread quick.
As all of the others before me have said, I would put that down as basically impossible. I don’t think I have even heard a threat from a fellow Marine aimed at Clinton, only the utter dislike felt towards him. But discipline overrides that. Whenever anyone of any importance paid a trip to a military base, arms tend to be unloaded, whether it was Bush Sr, Clinton, or GW.
What’s the point of having guards with no ammo? What did they expect you to do if someone decided to break through your gate?
Why wouldn’t the U.S. military trust its own people to carry ammo? Of all the people I would trust to carry a few rounds, a trained U.S. soldier on guard duty would be at the top of the list. If we can’t trust you to carry ammo without going nuts and shooting a few locals for fun, why would we trust you to be in the military at all, much less put you on guard duty? Even Barney Fife got to carry a bullet in his pocket.
We wondered the same thing everyday. There were German civilian guards on the base. They were armed.
Because it only takes one knucklehead to ruin the career of his boss. It’s called CYA. It is also probably an reaction to some incident that actually happened somewhere. When I was deployed somewhat recently there were several “negligent discharges” of weapons that should have been locked but not loaded. All of the incidents where I was consisted of PVT Gump shooting into a clearing barrel when clearing a weapon. The average soldier is not as dumb as many think they are. The army is not filled completely with rocket scientists either.