Comments on: Niger

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 16:42:34 +0000

Vets are already calling Kelly a ‘Blue Falcon’, the polite version of ‘buddy fucker’ for his conduct. You don’t attack the family of a KIA [killed in action]. Trump has attacked the Khans last summer, and now the Johnsons. Attacking Gold Star families is as low as it goes. Kelly is even more loathsome because he knows the pain and did it anyway to protect a politician. Even George W. Bush knew enough to keep his mouth shut when he was attacked by families of the fallen.

La David Johnson made E-5 [Sergeant] in three years. That is fast. His primary specialty was light vehicle mechanic but he qualified to wear the maroon airborne beret. He was assigned to a Special Forces unit. He must have been a hell of a soldier.

By: Kryten42

Kryten42 — Wed, 25 Oct 2017 13:35:25 +0000

I mentioned in a comment some time ago that I lost a member of my team who was also a friend since childhood. His Mother asked me to write & give the eulogy. I knew him better than anyone outside his immediate family. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. And our unit missions were mostly covert, which made it even more difficult.

It’s one reason why this has made me so angry. What Trump & Kelly have done, is completely dishonorable, immoral & unethical! I expected nothing less from Trump! But Kelly dishonor’s his uniform, the oath to protect the constitution, & anyone who served with him. He should be stripped of all honors & commission’s he’s ever received.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 15:44:25 +0000

Writing letters to the families of members of your unit, even when you know them, is a damn hard thing to do. There is no way to ease their grief, and trying usually makes it worse. We had a lot of unaccompanied tours to isolated locations in my command, so letters sent out on the next available aircraft was the best we could do. Even then, you had to assume that your letter was possibly the first notification a family might receive because of the classified nature of some of the things we did. The unit commander wrote the ‘official’ letter, but you wrote a personal one if he worked for you. It comes with the stripes. You just hope that the notification was made before your letter got there.

By: Procopius

Procopius — Tue, 24 Oct 2017 09:54:44 +0000

I have a feeling that somehow General Kelly managed to avoid notification duty when he was a junior officer. He must have been a lieutenant after Vietnam but before Iraq. It seems like he’s never delivered the notification for the survivors of a combat death. There’s a packet they give an officer who’s been appointed to the duty, probably the worst duty an officer has to perform — if he has any human feelings. I once served under an officer who seems to have been much like General Kelly. His father was a career officer and seemed to have been something of a martinet, so of course the kid grew up thinking that was how you were supposed to treat other people. He was actually a pretty good officer, but if constant criticism bothered you. you probably wouldn’t enjoy working for him.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 14:32:36 +0000

Trump doesn’t know the difference between the personal and the political and neither he nor Kelly know how to talk to women. This White House has been acting like a cat covering crap on a tile floor since Trump made the claim about contacting all of the Gold Star families.

This is one of the many known processes of the Office of the President. There has always been a procedure in place to handle this, but Trump didn’t set one up, just like he didn’t set up the Easter Egg Roll until the last minute. He doesn’t know anything about the Presidency, and hasn’t asked for help from former Republican staffers to set up these operations. He’s an incompetent schmuck.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Mon, 23 Oct 2017 02:42:18 +0000

So Congresswoman Wilson was apparently in Mrs. Johnson’s car because she’s a personal friend of the family who had known Sgt. Johnson since his childhood, when she’d been principal of his school and then head of an after-school program that he participated in, rather than out of a desire to “play politics”. That makes Trump’s attacks on her look even more horrid. Not that the MAGAts will care. Their God-Emperor Donald the Trump has spoken, so that’s all, because they have faith, faith I say, in their duly selected God-Emperor.