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Rebuttal to NYT article about Marines and Armored Vehicles
COUNTERCOLUMN: All Your Bias Are Belong to UsMonday, April 25, 2005 The Marines of Company E The Marines of Company E (the New York Times doesn't bother to tell us the parent unit, for some reason, but I want to say it was the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines...ah, yes, there it is on page 3) took over Combat Outpost, on the eastern edge of Ramadi, from the 1st Bn, 124th Infantry regiment's Charlie company, plussed up with a platoon (+) from my own Headquarters company. I was a frequent visitor, and often spent a day or two there to visit HHC soldiers and get away from the flagpole across town. The Marines of 2/4 took over central Ramadi from us, after a brief relief in place operation and a right-seat/left-seat ride process that was probably too short, in retrospect. The Marines were just trickling into town as we were packing up to leave, and we even encountered the 2/4's stay-behind elements in Kuwait frantically trying to scavenge anything useful they could find - especially armor. Now the Marines are sounding off about equipment problems in the New York Times. It doesn't surprise me that the Times is covering the story. And it deserves to be covered. But where was the Times when Brian Chontosh won his Navy Cross? MIA, that's where! And the Times has been MIA on a lot of other stories, too: http://iraqnow.blogspot.com/2004/08/why-arent-reporters-interested-in.html Aside from the inexplicable omission of the unit designation until three quarters of the way into a lenghty article (WTF, guys???), the Times does a reasonable job here, for a layman's effort, in profiling the challenges of Company E. The leadership challenges, though, are by far the more compelling and interesting story to me, rather than the equipment shortage story. Believe me, the Marines rolled into Iraq far better equipped than we did. We hit the ground in Iraq with a whole headquarters company full of troops and exactly zero (0) vehicles. What's more, the vehicles we didn't have yet had canvas doors on them. Armor? What armor? We still had the old Viet Nam era soft flak vests, not the kevlar vests -- and just two desert camoflage uniforms per man (the active duty standard issue was four). Actually, the active army guys were pretty incredulous that we had no kevlar vests. Some notes about the New York Times article: Read the rest at the link. Bias in the NYT? They don't begin to tell the whole story. Posted by: Deacon Blues 2005-04-26 |
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