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Freedom
is not free... but the U.S. Marine Corps will
pay most of your share. |
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From the
Sand Pit 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. |
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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 the 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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I dream
of bin Laden waking up to find me standing over him with my boot on his
throat as I spit 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. |
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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. |
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I've been living with these
Tajiks and Uzbeks, and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtuns, 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, nor for each other, nor
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 other's barbarism. Cavemen
with AK-47s. Then
again, maybe I'm just cranky. |
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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 fighters are cunning like jackals, 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.... |
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Taliban
men have 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. |
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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. |
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Please, I tell you and your 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 the truth, but rather to keep you glued to the screen through
the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst thing you
guy 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. |
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Saucy Jack
Recon Marine in
Afghanistan
Semper Fi
"Freedom is not free... but the U.S. Marine
Corps will pay most of your share". |
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Pass this page on
to ALL OF YOUR FRIENDS so that people here will really know what is
going on over there. |
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A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank
check made payable to "The
United States of America for an
amount of up to and including my life".
That is Honor, and there are way too many people in
the USA who no longer understand it. |