If you’re going to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people, then maybe you ought to think about protecting the asses of the National Guard and Reserve you sent over there. I nominate Specialist Thomas Wilson for the Sam Donaldson Tough Question Award:
CAMP BUEHRING, Kuwait – After delivering a pep talk designed to energize troops preparing to head for Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld got a little “talking to” himself from disgruntled soldiers. [snip…]
Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, for example, of the 278th Regimental Combat Team that is comprised mainly of citizen soldiers of the Tennessee Army National Guard, asked Rumsfeld in a question-and-answer session why vehicle armor is still in short supply, nearly three years after the war in Iraq.
“Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?” Wilson asked. A big cheer arose from the approximately 2,300 soldiers in the cavernous hangar who assembled to see and hear the secretary of defense.
Rumsfeld hesitated and asked Wilson to repeat his question.
“We do not have proper armored vehicles to carry with us north,” Wilson said after asking again.
Rumsfeld replied that, “You go to war with the Army you have,” not the one you might want, and that any rate the Army was pushing manufacturers of vehicle armor to produce it as fast as humanly possible.
Don’t you understand, Specialist Wilson, we couldn’t wait for manufacturers to turn out enough Humvee armor for proper war deployment! There was an imminent threat! Iraq had these massive stockpiles of WMD’s they were prepared to launch at 45 minutes notice! They were building up their nuclear program! We couldn’t wait long enough to equip you properly, because we couldn’t risk the smoking gun being a mushroom cloud!
Rumsfeld was later asked why the regular Army units were getting preferential treatment in supply and support compared to the Guard and Reserve units. Rumsfeld said he had no proof, but was assured that all units were being treated equally. Uh, right. Let me tell you, as a former Guardsman who was in training with regular Army, I got taunted enough times as a “No Go” (military slang for National Guard, the abbreviation N.G., which also stands for “no go”, as in “failed a test”, or derisively as “not going to go to any actual combat”) to know there’s an institutionalized discrimination against the Reserves.
The Democrats need to jump on this. If this goes on, the Republicans could lose the military and veteran vote for a generation.
