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Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Michael Yon - Recent Dispatches

I hope you will take the time to read Mr. Yon's recent dispatches from the front lines in Iraq. I just finished reading his latest dispatches, and the I will post portions of these below with links to the complete disatch/Article. These are must read articles that give insight of the facts and shows how poor a job the Media we see on TV is doing. They take pistucres of car bombs or air al-Qaeda propaganda. It is sick how bad of a job the mainstrean Media/News is doing. We need to hear the facts not hype and assumptions. Mr. Yon has many links in his articles to videos he took and also there are many pictures.

Bread and a Circus, Part II of II

......That morning, still in Baqubah and trying to get the convoy organized, a truck driver had approached us with intention in his eyes. LTC Johnson closed on the man whom he suspected was a suicide bomber. My video was running as Johnson drew his pistol. If a bomb had detonated, Johnson and a few others would have definitely been killed. I might have survived—although in no condition to write these words—but had I, it would have been solely due to Johnson and the others having closed space with the man. But they actually risked their lives not to save mine, but his: they could have shot him from a distance of perhaps even 10m farther, but it happened so suddenly they just moved straight in. That was courage.

As it happened, the man who had closed space with us was simply an Iraqi coming forward to help start the convoy rolling. The Iraqi man—I’ll call him “Tonto” because he’s still in the thick of the war—owned some trucks and wanted to get his business going. Guts and capitalism make an impressive combination.......Full Article Click here

Second Chances

.......General Petraeus was Colonel Petraeus, Colonel Petraeus was Captain Johnson’s new commander. They were doing a live-fire exercise at a range at Fort Campbell when a young soldier named Specialist Terrence Jones tripped and accidentally fired his weapon while conducting a live-fire assault. The bullet from Specialist Jones’ weapon struck Colonel Petraeus, slamming through his chest and taking a piece of his back on the way out. Petraeus fell to the ground, bleeding out of his mouth. He nearly died. We could have lost one of the most important and influential military leaders in generations to a mistake. To a professional misstep.

The best that Captain Johnson and Specialist Jones might have hoped for was a painless end to their military service. I asked LTC Fred Johnson about the story of his own soldier shooting David Petraeus, and I asked how it could be that Johnson was still in the military. Johnson looked me in the eye and said something like, “Mike. You know what Petraeus did?”

“What?” I asked........ - Michael Yons full Article here

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