God-damned son-of-a-bitch worthless fucking bureaucratic assholes. Goat-felching, piss-drinking, shit-eating mother-fuckers. I can’t fucking believe how low this administration can go. Every time I turn around, they’re doing something else so un-American and wrong-headed that my blood just boils.
First, they don’t’ provide enough body armor. Then, they don’t provide appropriate body armor. Now, if you’re wounded in battle, and they have to cut your body armor off you and burn it as a bio-hazard, they bill you for losing your body armor.
Un-fucking-believable.
This is what happens when incompetent, evil men run your country.
I am sad and infuriated on his behalf.
Total Military BS. I thought the hoops I use to have to jump through to get a working multimeter was bad, this is off the charts.
I am sure someone will be along to defend the military’s practice in this case, but it is sick. Let’s see soldier lost armor while being treated for being blasted by a bomb. That should be enough reason to accept the loss of body armor. I don’t think a sign off by a supply officer should really be required. So much for showing any common sense.
And the moral of this story is: If you get an arm shot off in combat, you quickly use the other one to keep control of the paperwork, accounting for all the army property that you are responsible for. And when you pick up your combat gear as you march out into the Iraqi desert, don’t forget to pick up your supply of XYZ-789 forms, “Armor – Body – Loss of – In Combat – Accounting for”. You never know when you might need one of them.
Yes, I know President Bush is the Commander-in-Chief. And yes I know that if the US was not in Iraq (which IMNSHO should never have happened), this wouldn’t be an issue. Even given that, I don’t know how to tack this on to ‘the adminsitration’.
This is a dumb, fucked-up military rule. Most idiocy like this never gets up in front of President Bush or Secretary Rumsfeld (inventors of quite a bit of idiocy themselves). This kind of military stupidity knows no political bonds.
Ya know, it’s an awful, awful long fucking way from:
to laying this at the feet of the clowns in the executive branch in Washington. It is apparently so far, your logical processes decided to take a shortcut. You should send out a search party; they’re woefully lost.
President Harry S Truman had a sign saying “The buck stops here,” but for this administration apparently the buck stops with enlisted personnel in Iraq.
Your right. It was probably in the morning briefing and Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld all cackled gleefully while dining on Baby Brains Benedict. Or maybe, now that it was in that bastion of journalism, the “Charleston Gazette”, they’ll take notice.
Unless someone gets this question beyond their well-heeled White House Press Corps and to the President in a public forum, or unless the national press decides to pick up the story, Bush et al will never know what happened to this soldier. That’s what happened with the vehicle armor story; national news agencies picked up the story. When put on the administration’s radar, then it is appropriate to blame them for not fixing it.
Gahd Dayum! Ten years ago, I was defending Clinton against undeserving attacks and trying to focus rabid conservatives on deserving attacks. Now, I’m defending Bush from rabid liberals trying to lay the blame for every fuck-up on his doorstep. The military is a screwed up bureaucracy. They invent rules and regulations which defy reason and logic that no civilian (and most military) will never understand. And most of the time, the people shuffling paperwork from point A to point B will not blink an eye when something crosses their desk. For all they know, this soldier was mustering out and trying to take his body armor with him. It would be nice if errors like this could be handled quickly and efficiently, but it rarely happens (and when you find someone who can handle stuff like this, you tell no one and go to him/her for everything).
Speaking for myself, my standards have fallen pretty far, but I’d just like to see some occasional, y’know, leadership from our leaders once in a while, whenever they take a break from shoveling the contents of the public treasury into the accounts of their super-rich compatriots.
You’re right Cervaise. Why the fuck wasn’t George Bush down at that Fort Hood accounting office, personally checking to see that every item was correctly filed?
Oh, wait a minute.
So obviously the problem isn’t some dumbass battalion commander who probably got yelled at during his last evaluation because his books didn’t balance, so now he’s taking it out on his soldiers.
Nope, it seems to me more likely that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld personally signed the order charging this guy $700 for his destroyed armor, masturbating like mutherfucks all the while.
The supply officer or battalion commander, or whatever he is, should have just signed the fucking form. This is bureaucratic stupidity, and it belongs at this clown’s door. Barring that, the Army should change the rule. Immediately.
CNN had a short segment on air that seemed to back away from the details of this story. No Rebrook stories showed up in a search of cnn.com just now. There will likely be more on this in the Charleston Gazette tomorrow morning.
I agree. In a combat zone the commanding officer has wide latitude in declaring government property destroyed as a result of enemy action. Or they used to. It should be routine.
I’m just perplexed why this got this far, or was a problem for so long. He’s had time to appear on As it Happens on CBC Radio this evening, when you’d think by that time someone would have said “fix this problem now” already.
I’m pretty sure the powers that be will announce that they’ve reversed this tomorrow, but at a time when “recruitment and retainment” seem to be the first order of business for the U.S. Army, it’s an incredibly damaging thing to let happen.
The more stations the story hits, the better chance of it getting the attention of someone who can do something. However, I don’t thing the Charleston Gazette and As It Happens are really on the president’s radar (although I hear now that The Electric Company is out on DVD, he may finally catch up on his reading lessons).
If you want to find the source of all shit, you go to the top of the hill.
And if that guy ain’t doin’ it, then why the hell ain’t he doin’ it?
And the Republicans wonder why liberals think George is incompetant, when even they think that nothing that happens anywhere in government is under his control.