Pray for our soldiers, and pray for those who haven't heard of Jesus Christ.
Real letter from a Marine on recon in Afghanistan:
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.
I glance around my butt every ten to fifteen seconds to avoid another scorpion sting. I've 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.
The one truth the Taliban cannot escape is that 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 hand-held, 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. 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. 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.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: This country blows. It's not even a country. There are no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no government. This is an inhospitable, rock pit sh-t hole ruled by eleventh century warring tribes. There are no jobs here like we know jobs. 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 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.
I've been living with these Tajiks and Uzbeks and Turkmen and even a couple of Pushtins 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 or for each other or for themselves. They claw at one another as a way of life. The play polo with dead calves and force their five-year-old sons into human cockfights to defend the family honor. Huns, roaming packs of savages, heartless beasts who feed on each other's barbarism - cavemen with AK47's. Then again, maybe I'm just cranky. 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 and write a letter to CNN. Tell Wolf and Anderson and that awful, sneering, pompous Aaron Brown to stop calling the Taliban 'smart'. If they're smart, CNN should invest in a dictionary because the word they're looking for is 'cunning.' The Taliban are cunning, like jackals and hyenas and wolverines. They're sneaky and ruthless and when confronted, cowardly. They are hateful, malevolent parasites who create nothing and destroy everything else. Smart? Yeah, they're real smart. They've 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. Okay, enough. Snuffie will be up soon so I need to get back to my hole.
Covering my tracks in the snow takes practice, but I'm good at it. Please, turn off the TV and move on with your life. The story you get from CNN and others is utter bullsh-t. It isn't designed to deliver truth, but to keep you glued to the screen for the commercials. We've got this one under control. The worst you can do is analyze what we're doing over here. You have no idea. And you really don't want to know.
We're your military. We're doing what you sent us to do.
Semper Fi
Jack
Recon Marine in Afghanistan
I posted this on our local club forum as well.
- Swash
- sold
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