Monday Night Lights

Its late on a Monday night, and I am on call. Since I am on call, I have trouble sleeping. Not insomnia, just a bit of forboding that I am going to get a call about a massive outage or something. Ahh...the life of a Network Engineer. Never boring, unless you find IP networks boring, that is...

I recieved another (loooonnnnnggg :-) comment from Successrealm tonight. Lots of things to consider, and not enough space in all of the Republic of Casiotone to go through them all here. One of the first things I looked into though was this:

They lied to you about the Jessica Lynch "rescue", the Pat Tillman death, the....

So, being the openminded person I am, I fired up Google, and among the hits was this rather fair assessment of the incidents in question.

http://www.spinsanity.org/columns/20030528.html
(just posting the summary of the work, not the whole thing, to keep things short)

Though far more responsible than Scheer or McKinney, critics of the BBC report from the right have used Kampfner's miscues to try to dismiss or play down the entirety of the Lynch story, though the main contentions of the original revisionist reporting on Lynch have stood up to scrutiny thus far. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, for example, wrote that "there's no story, really -- just a claim that things weren't as dangerous as they might have been, and that the Pentagon got as much PR out of the event as it could, neither of which strikes me as earthshaking." Andrew Sullivan simply dismissed the BBC report as a "smear." But these commentators have not directed the same outrage the BBC has faced at the press outlets that credulously repeated the original, mistaken reports about Lynch's capture and rescue. Certainly, it's news that several key aspects of what was arguably the most famous single incident of the war were apparently misleading and/or false.

Sounds to me like the normal SNAFU's of 1>combat and 2> government P.R. Yes, Jessica Lynch was captured. Yes, she MIGHT have been driven back toward the American lines in an ambulance, only to be turned away by gunfire (I would probably end up shooting at an ambulance speeding at me in the middle of the Iraqi desert as well, it could just as easily have been a suicide bomber in a stolen ambulance.) The whole Nation was worried about Jessica Lynch. She made us question our national stance on women in combat. The thought of her in the hands of Saddam's men was sickening to us. Of course, the millitary could have used the situation to gain a P.R. win. You know what? I am fine with that.

The death of Pat Tillman. This is one of the worst tragedies to strike the modern Army of the United States of America. Friendly fire killed Pat Tillman. That is a horror that is almost too terrible to contemplate. Yeah, it was shrouded in confusion and the truth didnt come out until some pressure was applied. The Army made a poor choice in trying to keep this aspect quiet from the American public. I plan to do a bit more digging, to see if there are any conspiracy theories other than what we already know. I confess that I dont know enough about it right now to converse deeply about the incident.

To Successrealm, I would love to get an email address to continue this discussion off-blog, just leave it in a comment, and we can do so. Talk to you soon.