Racists infest Ft. Bragg
Jack M sends us a link from some ditz, who strangely enough is/was a colonel in the Army, in Time’s attempt at being a milblog, called “Battleland” Oddly enough they claim that “Battleland” is “Where Military Intelligence is not a Contradiction in Terms”, but that is not in evidence in this piece by Elspeth Cameron Ritchie in which she claims to have deployed from Bragg to Somalia in 1992, which might be entirely possible, but she must have hit her head on something during the deployment;
Like many others, the question of military service and the mass shooting by Wade Page at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin got me curious.
So I simply Googled “military extremism Ft Bragg.”
A fascinating mélange of information surfaced, mainly from the Southern Law Poverty Center, but also from newspapers like Stars and Stripes, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the major daily near where the Sikh shooting took place.
Yup, and whatever wasn’t posted directly on SPLC’s website was somehow purloined from them, because SPLC hates Fort Bragg ever since that one couple was murdered a decade-and-a-half ago. Well, if you’re wondering what Elspeth’s Google search turned up;
– There was the murder of a black couple in 1995 by a pair of Soldiers, apparently to earn their “spider web tattoos.”
– Nineteen Fort Bragg paratroopers were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
– Timothy McVeigh tried, and failed, to complete a special-forces course at Fort Bragg, which some authorities believe was the trigger that led him to kill 168 people by detonating a truck bomb he had parked next to the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Yup, we already mentioned the murder, but then there were 19 soldiers discharged after that – 19 out of a population of 39,457, according to the 2010 census. That’s pretty tiny, and I’ll bet you could find more racists in any county in the country.
And Tim McVeigh rises from the dead again. I don’t know if he was racist or not, I can’t remember him ever saying that he was a racist, but that little nugget aside, he was at Fort Bragg for a few weeks. Did the racist cooties attack him while he in pre-phase? Is just being on Fort Bragg going to turn him into a racist truck bomber. I was there for years and I’m neither racist nor a truck bomber. It must have been my daily dosage of that watered-down beer they served outside the gate that inoculated me. And we’re talking about racism in the military, so why even mention McVeigh, well, except for the scary truck bomb imagery and the loose tie to Fort Bragg? Um, Elspeth, WTF, dear?
In a 2006 report – a decade after Fort Bragg’s extremists made news – the Southern Poverty Law Center said “large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force.”
Army officials say they do their best to weed out extremists. But as Sunday’s slaughter in Oak Creek makes all too clear, one extremist in the ranks is one too many.
First, anyone who believes anything from the SPLC is an ignorant POS, even if they are a colonel, and secondly, Page wasn’t in “the ranks” for more than a decade, dumbass. They booted him like they were supposed to do.
Category: Dumbass Bullshit
And yet you aren’t a member of either organization. Telling, ain’t it?
Seeing as how both the military and the extremist groups are fishing from the same pond, it’s inevitable that every now and then they’re going to land the same fish.
@48-Martinjmpr This is primarily what I am talking about. I get what you are trying to say, but the way it is worded comes across in a way that is disparaging. I do not question your service or patriotism, and you may think my readiong comprehension is poor :). But when things are worded a certain way, they are interpreted a certain way.
No harm, no foul brother.
OnYourKnees, you do realized if you divorce your wife, you’re still brother and sister. Same thing for your parents, yup brother and sister. That can only be the cause of your 100% retardation. Yes, it’s a real word but I wouldn’t expect a 2nd grade drop out to recognize that.
Last I checked, IAVA takes anybody as well. Look at Dilliberto. Never reached A-stan or Iraq.
I was thinking about something, Sparky was a Submariner he basically spent months under the water crammed on a boat. Hell call me crazy…I am…but I would rather have someone shooting at me than not being able to see the sun or breathe fresh air for months on end. Now we have a guy coming on here who never actually went to war calling him out? So FakerMcFakerstein I don’t think you have any room to talk. DUI Dude, I called troops monkey, chimp, ape, fuckstick, tard, bag o’ shit, ##@@$#@# (that is hard to pronounce), and many other names so I don’t know what army you served in, but I bet you heard ape thrown around and not in a racist way.
I can say from first hand knowledge that some of the ‘extremist activity’ discharges were complete PC BS. I was assigned to work in the 82nd Rep Co when my Bn (3-73) was being deactivated. During this time period, I was responsible to processing the paperwork involved whenever the Co CDR found a ‘extremist’ or ‘gang’ tattoo during the inspections of inprocessing Soldiers. For those not familer with the tattoo inspections, the MPs gave every commander a book with tattoo designs and if a Soldier was found with a tattoo that resembled any in the book, a investigation was conducted.
One involved a Soldier booted from RIP and sent to Bragg. During his inprocessing at 82nd Rep, he went and got a small, 2 inch swastika tattoo on his arm and made up some BS story to get a chapter. The night before his depature he had the swastika tattoo covered up. The other case that made an impression was a SSG(p) with 16 years TIS with an iron cross tattoo on his chest. The SSG told the investigators that he got the tattoo in Germany when he was a new PVT, thinking that it was a marksmanship badge. Clean record, and he was chaptered out.
Yet almost every ‘gang related’ tattoo found followed the same path. The Soldier would sign a sworn statement that they were no longer in a gang and MPI would declare that there was no justification for further action. The Army brass are too eager to fixate on the ‘skinhead’ Soldiers and incidents and completely ignore the gang activity on and around Army bases.
If there were entire neighborhoods in Fayetteville where neo-nazis were running things and nobody in their right mind would go after dark, would it be ignored?
RaptorFire22: if I recall correctly, IVAV also let one each Jonathan DeWald join – who’s own IVAV bio showed no service in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Or in any other part of SWA or any other combat zone, for that matter. The closest he got was Poland.
Ain’t that right, “Knees2TheBreeze” – or should I say, “Jonathan”?
When I was a PLT SGT, I occasionally used to get my platoon’s attention by saying, “Listen up, ya bunch of dumb apes…” And all my platoons were a mix of white, black, hispanic and (rarely) asian/PI. None of them were offended. One of my platoons in Division even took to calling themselves “The Apes.”K2B is offended simply because he/she wants to be offended. As my Granddaddy was wont to say, “You can find shit anywhere if shit is all you’re looking for.”
I was at Bragg for a few years and can’t recall any neo-Nazi or skinhead stuff going on. Maybe I didn’t hang out in the right places. There was some racist jokes and stuff but they were said by whites, blacks and hispanics alike. No-one got their panties in a bunch about it.
[…] another usual suspect, Elspeth Ritchie, who accused the military of harboring racist extremists a few months back. In their own article, NYT admits that privately owned weapons aren’t the major cause of […]