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Imagine you’re a Special Op’s Marine in Iraq. They’re known as Force Recon. You’re patrolling in the dead of night along the Tigress River. You’re in a Humvee with three others, lookin’ for bad guys. It’s hairy work. You often end up in the river inside your Humvee. You gotta’ get out right now!

But wait a minute, the door won’t open. You know why? Because the sucker weighs 500 pounds! That’s with all the new armor plate placed on it, thanks to the news media and incompetent leadership that allows this kind of thing to happen. What does it all mean if you’re a Force Recon Marine?

Not to worry, there is a standard operating procedure for everything. You’re highly trained so what is one more nonsensical order. Our Force Recon Marines are scuba trained. They now carry scuba tanks (yes, in the desert) at the ready, in their Humvee’s. If they should find themselves in the water and in need of exiting their vehicle, they just suck air from their scuba tanks, find the special little shape charge they carry for this purpose and simply blow open, yes blow open, the 500 friggin’ pound door. Unbelievable! But it’s happening in our ‘war on terror’ as we speak. Do you think these warriors might be a little cynical?

As a young Marine back in 1965 a few months out of boot camp I found myself in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. It was in response to a Grenada like uprising in the filthy streets of the old Dominican city. It lasted maybe four days. I lasted one day before being wounded in the first act of political correctness I’d experienced. It was the first time I saw the stupidity of our modern version of war. It probably all began in the Korean War, whose participants in this country are truly the forgotten warriors.

In Santo Domingo, the ‘rebels’ had taken over the city in an attempt to overthrow the government. Our unit’s assignment was to go in and take back the radio station while other Marine units and the 82nd Airborne attended to other duties. Our rules of engagement for the conflict were that we could not use anything larger than our M-14’s, an M-60 machine gun or grenades. That was it.

We were all young and didn’t know what we didn’t know, so off we went off full of adrenaline and excitement. We were crossing a couple hundred meters of dirt, advancing towards an old two story wooden building, when we were raked with machine gun fire. We did what Marines do, a frontal assault. It was really scary. They pinned us down for awhile but we advanced through the fire and eventually took the gun out.

Here is where it is well to note we had tanks. The big ones like in the movies. They could have removed the machine gun raking us with one big round of fire. But rules are rules and we assaulted the old way, pretending we didn’t have superior fire power, and the result … four killed and thirty-six wounded. All self inflicted wounded because of our own rules of engagement. But I am proud to say we didn’t damage that old, dilapidated building.

The current Marine sniper ‘rules of engagement’ in Iraq is a booklet twenty-eight pages long. That’s a short story. In Iraq the number of Marine snipers killed is approaching thirty. In Vietnam where I was a Marine sniper for two consecutive years, in all the years over there we didn’t have half that number. Our leaders would say “it’s a different kind of war”. It is different, political correctness has gone mad.

I doubt that the Marines landing on Iwo Jima had a twenty eight page rules of engagement booklet. I doubt that the soldiers storming the beaches of Normandy had JAG legal officers over their shoulders second guessing their every move from back in the land of Starbucks and 31 Flavors. It is awful for these brave young men and women.

One soldier recently told me of being on a patrol in Baghdad trying to set up defensive position using concertina razor wire and was stopped by a higher up who said, “You can’t use that, it looks too aggressive.” Last time I checked you win wars by imposing your will on the enemy. Too aggressive, that’s BS?

If we’re going to win the war on terror it’s not going to be under the direction of the low life John Edwards types, standing back cherry picking everyone’s action, then trying to use our western laws against our fighting men and women. We’re civil people but war isn’t very civilized. It’s a dirty business. If you’re going to commit our nation’s youth to battle then turn them loose and let them do the job. Bush wants a troop surge, send home the lawyers, make the bureaucrats in the green zone get out in the field and you have enough troops to win the war.

It is time to let your Congressman and Senators know that the political correctness of the war on terror is costing well over half the lives lost … ask any returning vet. A young late thirties CIA dude home for a month from Iraq, told me recently that it is far easier to arrest someone for drunk driving than it is a terrorist in Iraq. As Dr. Phil would say, “How’s that working for you?”

Come on America, wake up and make our leaders either do this thing right or get out.

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