Wednesday, April 30, 2008

When caught, Army acts

Following up on last week's post about the awful living conditions for Iraq returnees at Fort Bragg, from Yahoo!News:

Army officials said Tuesday they are inspecting every barracks building worldwide to see whether plumbing and other problems revealed at Fort Bragg, N.C., last week are widespread.

Yeah, like the soldiers didn't tell the Corporals who didn't tell the Sergeants who didn't tell the First Shirt and so on and so on that shit was backing up into the barracks. Gimme a break.

I wonder how many of those GIs wrote to their Congressmen about the conditions? In my day, that was the way to get things done. When the Congresscritter inquired of the Commanding General just WTF was going on, things happened. It may have been out of trying to avoid an investigation and resultant damage to their careers rather than a sense of duty to the enlisted swine, but things got done.

Oh, silly me, I forgot - the military works for Bush now, not us. Congress doesn't count any more.

I got a sneakin' hunch that these kinds of things are known by the local brass, but get put on a to-do list because the Bush administration would rather borrow trillions to profit their cronies than expend thousands on the welfare of the troops. I've heard that some bases have even had trouble paying their electric bills.

The operative word here is 'revealed'. One rightly pissed-off dad with a video camera and YouTube made more difference than a barracksful of soldiers in knee boots. That got this deal moved to the top of the list. The Army'll put a little PR lipstick on the pig and hope it goes away.

Support the troops. Yeah, right, until they gotta do something expensive like hire a plumber.

Crossposted at Alternate Brain.

1 comment:

deuddersun said...

Well, Brother, it does go to show what one person can do to make positive changes. All the more reason to keep on posting. It's up to all of us to "reveal" the bullshit our service people and military retirees are faced with.

d.