Tuesday, April 26, 2005
"Dirt Sailors": Bushco's misuse of the American military
When Dustin W. Peters, an Air Force supply technician, arrived in Kuwait in January 2004, all he and his fellow airmen knew was that they would be supporting US troops in Iraq. But when their unit received its assignment, they recalled, they were stunned: They would be protecting supply convoys traveling along Iraq's violent roadways....."Airmen are driving trucks in Iraq because the Army didn't have enough of them," Brigadier General S. Taco Gilbert, the Air Force's deputy director for strategic planning, said in a recent interview. "They're manning .50-caliber machine guns."..."We are definitely playing a part that is not a normal Navy role," said Lieutenant Lesley Smith, a Navy spokeswoman. "We have sailors who were assigned to ships [who are instead] guarding oil platforms in the Gulf. These are definitely different roles. We call them dirt sailors." Bryan Bender of the BoGlobe (via The Chimp
And National Guardsmen are expected to bear the brunt of combat duty -- for the same reasons that the Navy personnel are being used as "dirt sailors".
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