When I was a grunt medic we had a cynical nickname for ourselves: "high-velocity projectile interceptors".
Because we knew that in a real shooting war - a war against a peer enemy - that was very likely what was going down on our Field Medical Cards.
GIs, specially grunts, get shot. Or fragged by random artillery rounds. Or step on mines. Or get blown up by command-detonated boobytraps (now we call them "IEDs" like they were something new, but they're as old as gunpowder).
So when Our Idiot President demanded that GIs be deployed to our own cities (at least the ones he hates, like Chicago and Portland and D.C.) I had two genuine fears.
The first, and most obvious, was the reason for 18 U.S.C. § 1385; that using soldiers against your own people is bad for the soldiers and bad for the people. Bad for the people because, duh, military dictatorship. But bad for the soldiers because they become associated in the public mind with military dictatorship.
Soldiers are poor "peacekeepers", at best, and the worst examples of military occupation have always been fraught with the danger that the soldiers, trained to respond to threat with immediate, lethal, as-overwhelming-as-possible force, will go ballistic on the civilians around them.
That's bad enough when those civilians are "foreigners". When they're your own people?
Fuck that noise.
(As an aside, when I heard that the Nitwit-in-Chief was kicking around the idea of sending one of the battalions of the 82nd Airborne Division I facepalmed so hard I knocked my cap off. Infantry in general and paratroops in particular are reeeeally bad domestic occupiers; they're among the most kinetic of infantry soldiers by both training and inclination. It comes as no surprise that among the most lethally idiotic moments in recent Western occupation operations - the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" shooting in Derry, and April 2003 protest fusillade in Fallujah - both had paratroops on the occupying side doing the murdering.)
But the second was for the troopers themselves.
Because they had only two options, both of them exceptionally poor.
Option 1 was to treat the city and the citizens where they were deployed as an active and dangerous enemy. In other words, like the paras in Derry or the 325th in Fallujah. Treat everyone as a potential guerilla, treat every encounter as a combat patrol. Go out of the wire locked and loaded and looking for trouble.
That would have set up a Bloody Sunday or Fallujah April as surely as the sun rising. At some point there'd be one of those "checkpoint shootings" that were a daily routine in Iraq, and all Hell would break loose.
But Option 2 was to treat it like what it is; a ridiculously pointless piece of political theater. Loaf about in a gaggle or three, scroll on your phone, pass the time, just kinda hang out...like this:
That's a "One grenade'll get y'all!" clusterfuck if ever I've seen one.
But how else can you "occupy" one of your own cities that's not in open revolt? Without creating a 100% chance of the checkpoint shooting inevitable in Option 1?
Since this is The Land of The Free and the Home of the Insanely Over-armed, that was also inevitably leading to this:
You knew where this was going, right?
Of course Felony Fats has seized on this grim little horror his own stupidity and incompetence set in motion to help push his little Nazification project of ridding the precious pure American blood and soil of the taint of evil foreigners, dusky invaders, liberal traitors, and...well, every other fucking thing the bloated sonovabitch hates.
I have no idea what the poor GIs were doing when they were ambushed, but I'll bet you all the money in your pocket that it was some version of "standing around with their thumbs up their asses"; something utterly worthless. They were torn apart - or killed - for nothing.
Nothing.
There's nothing about any of this that makes any kind of sense. There's almost nothing about it that can be made to make sense; it's all just a hollow shell of nothing.
I have no idea what any possible value there is in any of this; Trump's lunatic war on blue cities, whatever his legionaries are supposed to be doing, what happened to make an Afghan drove from Washington state to D.C. to kill two randos in tree suits, the larger war on "immigrants"...any and all of it.
It just looks from here like stupidity running head-on into angry assholishness then bursting into flames and sailing off a cliff into a cesspond.
And we've got three more fucking years of it.
Christ, WASSSSSSSF...
