More proof that no one at the New Yorker has an Anus, or military experience…

Yea man, that’s how it is over there. 60 days of constant attack is all it takes. Its a lot harder for us National Guard guys because we only go over on the weekends, so it has to be 60 days of sat’s and sundays….and those are the days the enemy usually take off so we were in a realllly bad place.

On top of all that, I was pulling shell fragments out of my dcu’s the whole time I was there. See, we used to eat hardboiled eggs every morning and we were pretty messy with them.

Well, in order to give the benefit of doubt about the CIB; maybe he was referring to the CAB (Comabt Action Badge)? Although, as TSO pointed out, fact checking your story might be a good place to start.

The other part of the story that bothers me is when Cain was hoping to win a Purple Heart. Why would anyone want to win an enemy marksmanship badge on purpose, or have the goal of winning one? Been shot once, wasn’t fun, don’t wanna have it happen again.

I remember it like it was yesterday, man. After pulling some strings, we got assigned to clean up duty in the rear. We thought it was going to be refreshing for a change…like walking on a beach, or riding a horse, but we was wrong…bloody wrong. We slid in virtually undetected, and tucked in without anyone noticing. I figger’d we just go with the flow, but that’s when things got nasty. Before it was over, we was all coated down. Thank God we don’t have to pull this duty for at least another 28 days. Next time, I’ll get keep my damn fingers out of this shit. Period.

SPC Jesse Joshua McMassingil
69th Tactical Insertion & Retrieval Squad
D’ouchebhagdad, Iraq 2007-2008

I thought they just distributed tampons on the ends of helo rotors.

Fuck- I was an 88M before I went to flight school.

It was a mistake, for which I apologize. It somehow got past the factcheckers. It was pointed out by a soldier immediately after the story ran. There’s no excuse for it, and I am sorry. I think you’re hitting it a little too hard, though, if you’re holding it up as evidence of some sort of systemic ignorance of or contempt for the military on the part of the New Yorker. The New Yorker is ignorant about everything when it starts working on a story. All journalists are. It’s how we work. We make an attempt to understand it well enough to write a story, and then move on to the next subject. At the time I wrote that piece, the New Yorker was making a serious and good-faith effort to expand its coverage of the military, and I chose to focus on what the war was doing to soldiers. (I wrote about Mortuary Affairs, the psychological effect of killing, how junior officers were teaching each other on the internet how to fight the war, etc. All those stories are at http://www.danbaum.com.) Please read them. No doubt, you’ll find factual errors; military matters were new to me. But I don’t think you’ll find contempt for, or deliberate ignorance of, the military. The military is complex in many ways, especially during wartime. Reporters can only try their hardest to figure it out, and, despite the bonehead mistakes like this one, that’s what I, and my colleagues at the magazine, were trying to do.

TSO- it’s a little different when someone actually responds to your drivel, isn’t it?

ponsdorf.

There is truth to that to a extent. Yea the bullet tampons can be used that way and have even been brought up in my medic training. But with the creation and production of clotting bandages such as Quick Clot 2 generation, the demand for tampons would not be high enough to justify a large supply for medical use.

Christ almighty, listen to you children calling each other names. And you’re the guys you want us reporters calling up to check facts?

Dan Baum: Silence, you booger!

Dan, Years ago, just before I left the U.S. Navy Submarine Force, an Insurance Agent in Maryland wrote a book about Submarines. The premise was pretty far fetched, (a Soviet Boomer defecting? gedouttahere!)but the author’s inclusion of painstaking details on Submarine operations and the dead on portrayal of the Submarine community made this a very believable story, and took this book to the top of the charts, both in and out of the Navy. It also prompted a lot of talk throughout the Submarine Force about how close some of the information in the book came to real classified operations and tactics at the time. Clancy said (and it was checked) that no one had spoken to him about Submarine Ops, he had just done a ton of research using unclassified publications and had put 2 and 2 together. Let me tell you… he’s pretty good at math. Clancy’s attention to detail set a standard for the genre that few can match today. He took a far fetched premise that no one would believe and sold it with details. Now…Even though I am not a writer, (obviously) I understand that getting an article ready by deadline for a periodical must be a much more hectic and exacting exercise than a guy writing a fictional novel, and, as the saying goes, feces will, and often does, occur. Still, if Clancy could do such an impressive job with sensitive material and no one helping, how much easier would it be for someone on your fact check team to pick up the phone and call someone who knows about this everyday unclassified military stuff and run a quick fact check by them? That strainer wouldn’t catch everything, but it would take out most of the big chunks of bullshit. Whenever I read an article that has blatant, easily checked errors, it raises in my mind the possibility that the writer got other facts wrong too. It lessens the credibility of the entire publication and contributes to the growing perception that reporters, (and their editors) are, by and large, lazy and don’t let the… Read more »

He probabley actually said “I hope I don’t get V.D.”

@Ray: Clancy got some stuff wrong… he made sonar techs sound like intellectuals. If the front end was all that Clancy made it out to be, the ComSubLant guiadance for TRE would not state ‘To maximize your commands’ TRE score, maximize the number of nuclear-trained personnel on your tracking team.’