This morning on Fox and Friends there was a report about the Army relaxing its weight standards to allow fat boys to enlist. They mentioned that these fatties had to be able to do 13 pushups in a minute. This gave the reporters the opportunity to chuckle and make fun of the Army's desperate attempt to boost enlistments. This caused my blood pressure to sail and my veins to pop out and my horns to start growing...well, it bothered me. It shouldn't; I have 26 years of experience with the media reporting things that are skewed, doctored, or out-and-out lies about the military. But it did bother me because any fool could see what the story was supposed to be about. The Army released this information to encourage potential recruits who didn't make the cut, physically. They get to sign up and then they have a year to get into shape to go to basic training. I am not sure where the 13 pushups came in, (the reporter "dropped" and knocked out 13 at the urging of his comrades...but by ten he was visibly slowing and he popped up at 12 and claimed it was 13) but I know the standards for 20-year-old males couldn't have dropped that much. But no attempt was made to make a more accurate, "fair and balanced" report; they had too much fun with it for that.
The media has a long history of mis-reporting military news. Even newsies who write books about their experiences reporting on wars have a tendency to stretch the truth, or more often, shrink it. Just the other night we had some friends over and after dinner we were talking about Korea when the comment was made that we "lost" the war in Vietnam. This is not a thought that I allow to go uncommented on. I gave them the acid test: The Tet Offensive, 1968. Walter Cronkite, reporting on the fighting in the streets of Saigon, pronounced that this was it, we just couldn't win this war or words to that effect. America believed him and the anti-war sentiment took on a larger dimension than it had had. Truth? The Tet Offensive cost the US and its allies about 4000 casualties...the VC and NVA? 40,000. For those of you like me who are arithmetically challenged...that is a winning score for our side by a 10 to 1 margin. The 1965 battle in Ia Drang was likewise misreported. 7th Cav lost about 250 soldiers in one week in November...it was reported to be the first battle that we fought against the NVA, who lost over 1800 in that same battle. And yet it is believed to this day to have been a "massacre" on the scale of the Little Big Horn. (Same unit, then, too)
But the lies and misconceptions abound not only in the press, but in the halls of congress among our elected nobility as well. The most recent cases involve congressmen who called US Marines murderers, accused Army personnel of torturing and humiliating prisoners, and a candidate for president who accused our soldiers of terrorizing innocent families in the middle of the night. None of which was true and none of which was apologized for when the truth came out.
The most inexcusable case involved retired congresswoman Pat Schroeder (D-CO). She chaired a committee on military appropriations or housing or something like that. She toured Europe and came home to write an op-ed piece about living conditions in military communities in Germany. In that piece she was bemoaning the fact that military families overseas lived in better conditions than her constituents in Colorado. (Having lived here for 15 + years, I can tell you I would rather live in a military community overseas!) But in the op-ed she claimed that, for instance, when she toured the Benjamin Franklin Housing Area in Mannheim, she saw ranch style housing, a large shopping center, convenience stores, a theater, swimming pools, barbeques, and all the conveniences of suburban life in the States. Care for a little truth? I lived in BFV for three years in the sixties and for the next thirty years I passed through it on a regular basis. The "huge shopping center" was a medium sized PX with attached commissary and the little specialty shops that are common in PX complexes anywhere. The whole conglomeration would fit in the Safeway store that is a mile from my house. The Shoppette, a small convenience store, which used to close at 6 pm, was just that, so that was true enough. There was a good sized theater showing movies that were about 6 weeks to 6 months old. True, dat. Now the swimming pools? Her piece created the impression of a suburban scene with backyard bar-b-q's poolside. There were no ranch style houses. The senior officer houses were all two-story duplexes; the only pools she could have seen would have been little blow-up plastic kiddie pools. Those of us who were not senior officers lived in stairwells, apartment buildings three or four stories tall. The barbeques were lined up next to the sidewalk. In all, it was a piece meant to create a negative impression with folks back home at a time when money was tight and prices were high. She wanted to infuence the next appropriations bill and cut some of the money directed to housing improvements in Europe. She was a BIG FAT LIAR.
It still makes me mad. I have been unsuccessful in googling the article or I would have reprinted it for ya. Many of you have lived in housing overseas and I am sure that all she described was familiar to ya. I have offered many times to trade a few nights in my world with some of those arrogant congressfolk and let them stomp on the concrete porch before they walk their dog (scares the cat-sized rats back under the porch), or park a quarter-mile away from the apartment so they can carry their groceries into the stairwell and up four floors to their "ranch style house". Not to mention what becomes of those housing areas with a USAREUR level alert is called at 0300 and the whole world is trying to get out of the parking area at the same time, or any of hundreds of other little slices of suburbia we endured in the name of keeping the world commie-free.
They get out their flags and sing our praises when it suits them, when we come back from something mean and dirty, but when we are just waiting for the next one, we are the targets of derision and lies to further the ambitions and agendas of those who are not worthy to wear the uniforms they smear.
Whew...okay...got that outa my system for a while. Scroom. Especially Fox.