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2005-07-06 Fifth Column

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Posted by Bobby 2005-07-06 09:29|| || Front Page|| [1 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 I saw a story last month about the heaviest casualties were in the age 25-35 white group. 48% of all casualties. Now I want to see the MSM parading that story.

Posted by mmurray821 2005-07-06 13:04|| 2005-07-06 13:04|| Front Page Top

#2 The real story, US citizens of hispanic origin are patrotic folk and are very proud of their military service to our counrty. In La Lomita the upper working class Barrio I grew up in every hispanic house had proudly displayed pictures of sons in uniform. Some of them deceased, all the way back to WW2 and before. Nothing to see here? Yes, the real story and the MSM will not tell you any of it. MSM MIA.

Posted by Sock Puppet 0â Doom 2005-07-06 13:20|| 2005-07-06 13:20|| Front Page Top

#3 So the ~~Crushing Morale Post~~ Washington Post discovers that 11.6% of U.S. fatalities in the Iraq War are Hispanic. And what? Hispanics make up almost 14.4% of U.S. population. Also, what's in a name?

My surname is Hispanic, but I was born here and consider myself American and nothing else. Yet if I had been a U.S. casualty in Iraq, the Post would have listed me as a "victim" of U.S. discrimination merely on the basis of my surname and little else.

How does one's surname in any way reveal one's beliefs, politics, nationalistic inclinations? It doesn't just in the same way that race, religion, and heritage diminish identity with and loyalty to the United States of America.

Hispanics unfairly KIA ... kiss my ass!

Posted by Omavitch Cravitch1380">Omavitch Cravitch1380 2005-07-06 13:24|| www.michaelcalderonscall.com]">[www.michaelcalderonscall.com] 2005-07-06 13:24|| Front Page Top

#4 From StrategyPage June 15, 2005 Attrition categoty: Two percent of those killed have been women, while 31 percent were age 22 or younger. Only 11 percent of the dead were 35 or older. Active duty troops account for 78 percent of the deaths (but only comprise about 60 percent of the troops in Iraq). The army accounts for 69 percent of the dead, the marines 28 percent. Lower ranking troops (grades E1-E4) were 59 percent of the dead. Whites were 74 percent of the dead, blacks ten percent, Hispanic 11 percent. Itâs a suburbanites war, with 40.5 percent of the dead coming from the suburbs, and a third from rural areas.

It seems blacks(13%) and hispanics (13+%) are a bit unrepresented as a percentage of population, even more so as a percentage of the military age population. This is a reprise of the Vietnam war canard (lie, in unFrechified English) that blacks were a disproportionate percentage of casualties. Divide and conquer.

Posted by ed 2005-07-06 13:24|| 2005-07-06 13:24|| Front Page Top

#5 Sorry ... this line should read like this:

It doesn't just in the same way that race, religion, and heritage *do not* diminish identity with and loyalty to the United States of America.

Posted by Omavitch Cravitch1380">Omavitch Cravitch1380 2005-07-06 13:25|| www.michaelcalderonscall.com]">[www.michaelcalderonscall.com] 2005-07-06 13:25|| Front Page Top

#6 The ethnic makeup of the June fatalities was not provided by the defense department

That's because it's meaningless. They're all Americans, regardless of the color of their skins.

Posted by Robert Crawford">Robert Crawford 2005-07-06 13:28|| http://www.kloognome.com/]">[http://www.kloognome.com/] 2005-07-06 13:28|| Front Page Top

#7 Ed ... Vietnam Canard is right. Whites suffered most casualties not just numerically, but proportionately as well.

See:
Black Patriotism vs. Liberal Lies
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 20, 2002

"WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF LIES," wrote David Horowitz last November, "manufactured by progressives to discredit America . . . by sowing racial and ethnic hatred â in particular by spreading destructive myths among black Americans to make them hate their own country."

Sadly, there is abundant evidence supporting Mr. Horowitzâs assertion about progressives. It is inexpressibly tragic that by encouraging such anti-American sentiments in the black community, the Left utterly ignores the great patriotism that so many blacks have shown throughout our countryâs history, even during those eras when societal discrimination cast a dark shadow over every aspect of their lives. Examples of voluntary black patriotism do not harmonize with dogmas depicting our nation as racist and therefore unworthy of defending; thus the aforementioned progressives prefer to mischaracterize such examples as evidence of coerced black submission to societyâs oppressive demands.

Consider the issue of African Americans who fought in the Vietnam War, which was the subject of Mr. Horowitzâs November 5 article "Black America at War." In that piece, Horowitz took issue with the popular contention â which has become part of modern "conventional wisdom" â that black soldiers fought and died in disproportionately high numbers in Southeast Asia during the war years.

Horowitz wrote that whites comprised 88.4 percent of those who served in Vietnam, 86.3 percent of those who died there, and 86.8 percent of those killed in actual battle (as distinguished from those who died from accidents or illness). Blacks, he added, comprised 10.6 percent of those who served in Vietnam, 12.5 percent of those who died, and 12.1 percent of those killed in actual battle. Finally, he pointed out that 13.5 percent of our countryâs military-age males during the war years were black â meaning that there is no basis upon which to claim that a racist American government was indiscriminately rounding up large numbers of black men to be used as cannon fodder in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The National Archives and Records Administration, the Vietnam Helicopter Crew Members Association, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) confirm these statistics. In their meticulously researched book Stolen Valor, B.G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley also corroborate Horowitzâs numbers. It is necessary only to clarify that according to the VFW, Hispanics, who were originally counted as whites, comprised about 170,000 (or 5 percent) of the 3,403,100 personnel who served in the Southeast Asia Theater â Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. They also accounted for 3,070 (or 5.3 percent) of the casualties.

While many of the reader responses to Horowitzâs article thanked him for bringing to light some facts that were not widely known, many others strongly rebuked him for allegedly misrepresenting reality. He was accused of being, among other things, "unlearned," "unintelligent," a "liar," a "coward," and a "racist" traveling down a "dark path of ignorance and hate."

It is by no means surprising that some readers would react so hotly to Horowitzâs assertions. Like so many Americans, their opinions about the Vietnam War have been shaped by the claims of inaccurate though wildly popular sources. One such source is Wallace Terryâs best-selling 1984 book Bloods, which states that blacks in the war died in numbers far exceeding their representation in the U.S. population. "Black soldiers were accounting for more than 23 percent of American fatalities in Vietnam," says the book jacket, "although blacks comprised only 10 percent of Americaâs population." This myth was further reinforced in the popular culture by such media presentations as a 1986 Frontline television program called "The Bloods of âNam," which gave viewers the overall impression that our government was figuratively parading impoverished ghetto youngsters into the very crosshairs of Vietcong rifles.

Isnât racism problematic enough without having to "invent" it where it doesnât exist? The fact is that 7,257 black American soldiers were killed in Vietnam, a figure representing 12.5 percent of all American fatalities. As Burkett and Whitley point out, "an examination of the casualty records indicates that the highest rate for black servicemen was [16.3] percent in 1965, and almost all of those killed [during that year] were volunteers in elite units, not reluctant draftees involuntarily assigned to combat units. Black casualty rates dipped under their [13.5 percent] proportion in the population [of draft-age males] in most other years. In 1969, the warâs peak, black deaths accounted for 11.4 percent of the total." In short, black deaths in Vietnam were, overall, roughly proportional to what would be expected if they were drafted and sent into combat on a color-blind basis. If anything, their casualty rates were slightly lower â not higher â than their representation in the overall population of draft-age men.

In 1993, researchers Cynthia Gimbel and Alan Booth conducted an important study for the Population Research Institute at Penn State University. They examined several previous studies of black participation in the war and concluded that the literature simply did not support claims of disproportionate black service, combat exposure, or casualty rates during the war. In fact, their investigations indicated that black draftees had a significantly lower risk of being given a combat arms assignment than did white draftees. If we examine the numbers on a year-by-year basis, we find that black casualties comprised the following percentages of total casualties: 1962 (1.8 percent); 1963 (4.2 percent); 1964 (5.8 percent); 1965 (14.4 percent); 1966 (16.3 percent); 1967 (12.5 percent); 1968 (13.2 percent); 1969 (11.4 percent; 1970 (11.0 percent); 1971 (11.4 percent); 1972 (10.1 percent; 1973 (2.4 percent); 1974 (1.6 percent); 1975 (4.4 percent). In the earliest years of the conflict, Americaâs military presence in Vietnam consisted largely of advisors â some 16,000 as of November 1963. March 1965 saw the first arrival of American combat troops, who would not be completely out of Vietnam until March 1973.

Burkett and Whitley note that "the early [combat] units to go into war [in 1965] were elite troops of the Marine Corps, the Special Forces, and the 173rd Airborne, units almost exclusively populated by highly motivated volunteers â including higher proportions of blacks. Seventy-five percent of blacks who served in Vietnam volunteered to go. In fact, blacks tended to volunteer for combat at higher rates than whites." This explains the higher black casualty rates in 1965 and 1966, when heavy American combat began in earnest.

In sum, blacks were not in Vietnam because a racist government had summoned them from the ghettos in order to waste their supposedly expendable lives in remote jungles 8,000 miles away; they were there in large measure because of their own courage and patriotism, notwithstanding the fact that they often experienced racism back home. It is a great indignity to the legacy of those brave and selfless individuals for the Left to now insist on portraying their courageous march into Southeast Asiaâs battlegrounds as the functional equivalent of powerless captives being herded â because of their governmentâs disdain for their "genetic undesirability" â into Hitlerâs death camps.

John Perazzo is the author of The Myths That Divide Us: How Lies Have Poisoned American Race Relations. For more information on his book, click here. E-mail him at wsbooks25@hotmail.com

Posted by Omavitch Cravitch1380">Omavitch Cravitch1380 2005-07-06 13:31|| www.michaelcalderonscall.com]">[www.michaelcalderonscall.com] 2005-07-06 13:31|| Front Page Top

#8 "That's because it's meaningless. They're all Americans, regardless of the color of their skins."

Thanks, RC, right on the money. 2 observations to tack on...

Ironically, for an outfit like AFP, your statement is meaningless - they have no understanding or concept of the Melting Pot. It's not the Euro way of doing things or thinking, thus dismissed out of hand due to sheer ignorance, not to mention that it activates one of the agenda ticklers. That the numbers quoted are statistically trivial and meaningless, this is only a carefully selected slice in time, after all, is lost on most readers, so they know they'll successfully influence the dummies. AFP is an alien entity with no solid knowledge of America or Americans in this regard - and missing the key points because they're arrogant ignorant agenda-driven dickheads.

WaPo, on the other hand, quoted by the article as tracking ethnic stats (Can you say "common agenda"?), is something else entirely. Were they Americans (I suggest they're not.) they would've (and should've) taken a much larger view of the active social phenomena involved, such as the points made above that Hispanics, as a an ethnic group, are very patriotic and recognize the Armed Services as a very effective vehicle for personal betterment (e.g. tuition support), etc. Nah, they get no cover for ignorance, they deserve the bitch-slap due seditionists, political fifth columnists, and liars. It's simply whoring, disingenuous asstard divide and conquer MSM whoring. Fuck WaPo. In every way possible. I hope I live to see them fold.

Posted by .com 2005-07-06 13:50|| 2005-07-06 13:50|| Front Page Top

#9 Amen to the last 4 comments. The supposed party of tolerance and the mindset of the "tolerant" left breeds hate and division. They always try to divide and conquer to pull america apart. Better us fighting each other then them I guess is their strategy. It worked back in the 60s and 70s, but it is only pissing people off now days.

Posted by mmurray821 2005-07-06 15:12|| 2005-07-06 15:12|| Front Page Top

#10 I'm shocked -- not that AFP would play games with the statistics, but rather that Cravitch1380 is a Hispanic surname. Who would have guessed?!

Posted by Tom 2005-07-06 15:29|| 2005-07-06 15:29|| Front Page Top

#11 I don't see the point of this article, unless AFP is trying to stoke opposition to our Iraq efforts along the lines of age and ethnicity.

Posted by Bomb-a-rama 2005-07-06 15:31|| 2005-07-06 15:31|| Front Page Top

#12 BINGO! Someone give BAR a Cigar!

Notice that this is a carefully selected slice in time where the Statistics just 'happen' to agree with the AFP/WaPo Agenda. Notice that there is no mention of those killed in May, or April or any other month in the last 2 years.

I wonder how long AFP/WaPO were waiting for these numbers to happen to come along.

hey Look! The last 2 times I flipped this coin (out of the last 500 times) it was heads -- that means that it will *ALWAYS BE HEADS* from now on.

Posted by CrazyFool 2005-07-06 16:04|| 2005-07-06 16:04|| Front Page Top

#13 Not to worry folks. White, black, hispanic, asian, male, female...AFP will gladly dance on their graves as long as they're all dead Americans.

Posted by tu3031 2005-07-06 16:10|| 2005-07-06 16:10|| Front Page Top

#14 Anybody know what percentage of casualties in the Civil War and the Indian Wars were Irish?

I bet it's high. Besides being a recognized self-betterment system, it's also a quick route to citizenship. Very popular with immigrants, in whatever time slice you cherry pick.

Posted by mojo">mojo 2005-07-06 21:09|| 2005-07-06 21:09|| Front Page Top

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