Allah almost gave this one the “red meat graphic.”
Bill sets this one up nicely, by relating a conversation he had with a “pleasant Icelandic woman” who claimed that American military in Iraq are dumb or disadvantaged. When Bill gave examples of people who are not, she would reply that they are the exceptions to the rule. Bill says:
If my Icelandic acquaintance were to travel to Iraq, she might think, “My, there sure are a lot of ‘exceptions to the rule’ out here.”
And Bill goes straight into his interview of Lance Corporal Nathan (Chad) Yeager. A taste:
I could be rolling out there on a humvee, get shot at, and tuck and roll. But that’s not the way we do.
We stop, we put ourselves in danger, we get out of the humvee, we’ve got all our gear on, and we engage. The Marine Corps has trained us and trained us and trained us to be like that.
And I’ll tease you with this:
We’re on the baby steps right now. We’ve finally got ’em to where they’re halfway doing their job, going out there and doing their job, but if we pull out right now, they’re still halfway depending on us. If we pull out right now, let’s just say things will go straight back to where they were. There’s been a lot of progress here. Take the SMG (Special Missions Group – very roughly, an Iraqi SWAT team): the first night they went out, they got butterflies and chickened out. One of them said, “We don’t want to go out and do this, we just want to sit back and do QRF (Quick Reaction Force).”
And I said,
Well, you’ll have to go to Bill’s post to find out what he said.
