From The I'm Not Conflicted, Just Pissed Off Department:

Various stories from the front lines (where ever they may be) of the War Against Moslem Terrorists on the 229th birthday of the worst political system the world has ever seen (except for all the rest). Links courtesy of The Mudville Gazette (who really get it).

So what show had quieted the room. It was Braveheart. The specific scene that had everyone transfixed on the TV was when at the end of the movie he is being tortured. The entire crowd watching him being tortured is begging for him to ask for mercy. I think probably almost everyone in the room new this movie and new what was coming next. But we all wanted to hear it. We all wanted to see this man who was being tortured not beg for mercy but to maintain his dignity and keep faith with all those who had died before him.

So what were his last words going to be? What was he going to use his last breath to utter. What was so significant to him that he would allow it to take him to an excruciatingly painful death.

The answer came in his last word. Wallace gathered his strength and then with a yell that echoed through the mountains he bellowed: FREEDOM

We celebrate freedom at home. We are defending it here.

Happy Fourth of July!

Soli Deo Gloria
(Courtesy of Duke in Iraq.)


From The Mesopotamian:

INDEPENDENCE DAY
BELATED CONGRADULATIONS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ON THE OCCASION OF INDEPENDENCE DAY. MAY THE STRATEGIC ALLIANCE BETWEEN OUR PEOPLES LAST AND BECOME STRONGER AND STRONGER TO BRING THE FINAL DEFEAT AND EXTERMINATION OF ALL THE VERMIN AND TERRORIST SCUM IN THE WORLD.


From Lost in Iraq:

Happy Fourth Everyone!!! It’s crazy to think that this is our second 4th of July on deployment. It’s nice to see the end of all this madness drawing closer and closer. We’re all enjoying ourselves as best we can and couldn’t have picked a better group of people to be here with.

We had a great cookout earlier tonight in our courtyard. Herman, the DIVARTY mob boss, organized everything and did an excellent job setting up the backyard. Thanks a lot bro! I’ve included a couple of the pictures from last night. As I grab pictures from other people, I’ll post them to the site.I hope everyone enjoyed their 4th and are reading this hung over at work...


HAPPY 4TH OF JULY FROM ABU GHRAIB, IRAQ!!!

Happy Independence Day everyone! We didn't do much special here other than have our friday night fights moved up to tonight. It's not much, but it's entertainment, and everyone on the FOB loves them. We have boxing matches every Friday night. Anyone can join in, and it appears the more amateur the better. There's all types from fomer boxers to first timers, and the laughing and ooohs and aaahs rarely stop for the better part of three hours. And of course the National Anthem is sung and the flag saluted before any boxing begins. Usually it's played by CD player, but tonight it was sung live by another servicemember. It's very uplifting to see everyone in the crowd face our Nations colors and salute during the playing of our Anthem. I don't want to be cheesy, but sometimes over here cheesy is all you got. Tonight was moving to say the least. It was a little slice of home in a galaxy far, far away. Enjoy your holiday, and please, please have a beer for me. I'll have several for all of you upon my return!
(Courtesy of irishjag.)


Independence Day

Updated Equipment and Care Package Ideas on my Blog.

All said, today was a good day for the guys in my group.

We started finial preparation for the “Grillin’ in the Grotto, ‘05” cookout at 2 hours until grill time with a couple of my right hand men going to the chow hall to acquire more goods. We had a bunch of beef burgers and kosher hot dogs that had already been picked up the night before. They were able to get sodas and condiments to add to the meal. A half hour past grill time and the fire was in full blaze and people were waiting in the grotto for their share. All said and done, it was a good cookout with a lot of stories and laughs being shared. A few of us stayed and talked about the first OIF into the night and the crazy stories of last time we were here. Then we went up to the roofs to watch the battalion set off fireworks. Actually was quite a lot of little rockets and poppers. It was pretty cool being for the fact that we are over here and it could have been just another day in the cycle of OIF3, but it wasn’t. We actually got to sit back and relax some.

I have a long time tradition of “Cake Friday’s”; a day when I bring in home bakes goodies from my wife to the guys in my platoon at the office. It is an event that has been missed greatly by the soldiers that serve with me. While I’ve been here, my wife has sent me goods for an attempt to make brownies or cupcakes in the microwave. Today, I spent about 45 minutes making something similar to brownies. According to all that ate them, they turned out.

We had a high of 103o and that is with hazy conditions caused by storms somewhere, out there in the open desert.

Kind of odd to be out grillin’ without any family, but when you are deployed like this, you become as close as bothers. That’s how you continue to do your job; because you don’t want to let your buddies down. They are your family away from home. The grill man is one of my closest confidants here and he did an excellent job today.

I guess my statement from tonight is not quite the usual fare for a family cookout, but it went a little something like this.

We should remember and thank all those Americans who came before us who had been kicking ass over 228 years ago. Now it’s our turn to go out and kick some more ass.

Happy Fourth!
(Thanks to The "Mike Golf's" OIF3 Blog.)


And here is Neptunus Lex:

For me, it is too much of a holiday for unreflective self-satisfaction. Too much for an excuse to barbecue and burn. Too much for light shows, and oohs and ahhs.

But somehow not enough when men and women are dying overseas for the flag we hang out for a day, then roll up and put away until next year.

Because I'm often left to wonder if we still "get it." If we really understand what our Founders knew to be true when they scratched their names to that parchment 229 years ago - the most prominent men of their states and times, men of property and means and with a great deal to lose compared to most of their ambivalent countrymen: They had in fact just collectively signed their own death warrant. With numbers in the polity that should somehow surprise no one today: One third for them, one third against, one third undecided, they did in fact pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the truly revolutionary idea that governments ought to answer to the people, and that the contract between the people and the government is revocable, based on the government's performance of its duties to the people. No other people said this - they were all, the rest of them, "subjects" of their crowns.

They based that revolutionary precept of governmental responsibility upon another, one they claimed boldly to be "self-evident," although in truth their experience had to have proven otherwise: That all men were created equal. And building as much a logical argument for separation as anything else, since it was also self-evidently true then as now that not all men are equal in every way, they further went on to say that equality was in the eyes of the only judge that mattered: As children of Nature's God, all mankind was endowed by the Creator with certain "inalienable" rights. Rights inclusive of, but not limited to; life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This was a bold stroke of revolutionary thinking, one which went strongly against the established order and one which a "divine right" king must needs suppress, striking as it did directly against his own source of legitimacy. It was a concept tending, as Cornwallis' band would eventually note in 1781, to turn the world upside-down. Something a tyrant would have to fight even if it hadn't meant losing the American continent, and a snatching of the most precious jewel from the imperial crown of England.

Do we still understand that over the course of the next six years the continental army, outmatched and outgunned by the imperial power, lost in battle time and time again? Do we recall that their only real victory before the stunning surprise at the very end was the fact that they refused, although defeated, to be destroyed?

There would be so much more to go through for those plucky revolutionaries and their descendants: Not until 1783 would Congress recognize that war was over. Not until 1789 would the states ratify the Constitution, and enable our forefathers to attempt to fashion "a more nearly perfect union," a work, it must be admitted, which is still in progress. There would still be the ritual bloodbath of purification from our own Original Sin in our American Civil War. There would be our uncertain entrance as a reluctant actor upon the world stage, leveraging off the natural gifts or our continent combined with the spirit of hard-won success born from hard work, and that only after all the other great powers had brutalized themselves into almost senseless passivity. There would be the costly reconstruction of a devastated continent, and all the long, dark watches of a long, Cold War. And yes, there would be crimes against indigenous peoples, and iniquities in race and gender, and many more times when we fell very far short of our ideals, but there would also have been a time when those blemishes in our past gave context to the greater arc of our history rather than substituting for it.

And so I wonder if we still "get it."

But we went to the beach and did the barbecue, because that is what you do. And in a less formal way, we talked about these things in our own circle of family, because that is what I do, and the children at least tolerate this in me, with varying degrees of grace. And leaving the beach we sought the high grounds above Del Mar to watch the fireworks from the fairgrounds, and found ourselves there surrounded by many of our neighbors, and many people of different backgrounds and tongues who all of them watched the fireworks with that gleam in their eyes, the continuing child-like delight. And while watching the show and the people with a certain degree of detachment, a kind of duality within me sees two separate visions in the same manifestation: I see the continuity of our national adventure, our national experiment, re-celebrated through the grown up eyes of a child, from out of the mists of my faded youth. But I see through the eyes of a veteran and compare the show to the shattered, but still-lethal lances of anti-aircraft artillery, arcing through night skies. And while both of these visions are somehow incompatible, the eyes of innocence versus the eyes of experience, somehow they are both also true. Because the fireworks represent our national continuity, but they also represent the "rockets red glare" attacking the homeland as seen from the deck of a hostile warship.

And like I do every year, I try, and mostly fail, to articulate this to my patient and long-suffering clan. To try to ensure that we still "get it."

Whatever "it" is.

Don't worry, citizen. You definitely get it.

BTW, kiddies, ain't Bloggerdom grand?