Excellent article on the trends of voting emerging in the

[roguevalley]

military. Embedded all the way to the bottom are amazing comments and conclusions. If I were Bush, I wouldn't unpack.

Read it here: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0311.wallace-wells.html

Excerpt:

A similar mood is emerging in small, patriotic towns around the country. According to a study conducted in mid-October by Stars and Stripes, half of American soldiers in-country say their units have low morale, that they were insufficiently trained, and that they won't reenlist. The ubiquity of email in Iraq means that husbands, wives, families, and friends of these troops have a mainline to these gripes, and to the day-to-day grit and threat of combat, that they haven't had in previous wars. Holly Rossi, whose husband, Rob, is an Army reserve engineer out of Londonderry, N.H., has watched the Family Support Group for his unit, wives who started the war as staunch pro-Bush patriots, come to doubt the political mission. "A lot of people feel tugged. We have built our lives around ... patriotism no matter what, but we're feeling very abandoned." Charles Carter, a retired Naval chief petty officer, told Knight Ridder: "I will vote non-Republican in a heartbeat if it continues as is."

Also, there was a contrast between to letters written to send off troops between Edwards and Dole. It was illustrative to the writer
of the distance dems have to go to 'get' the military life:

Any Democrat in the crowd or among the Wolverines would have cringed at the contrast. These letters are an unglamorous staple of life in political offices in Washington; 27-year old junior staffers, not Edwards or Dole themselves, wrote them. But they reflected quite clearly what many, many retired officers told me last month: The Republican majority in the military community is due less to any specific policies than to a sense that they "get" what the military is all about, while the Democrats don't. Elizabeth Dole's letter, compassionate and personal, "got" the military. John Edwards's perfunctory, bland sending off, which could have been a fare-ye-well to recently assigned airport security guards, did not.

[newyawker99]

1. kick

:kick:

[radfringe]

2. a co-worker's brother-in-law

is in Iraq right now

he had previously served in the Gulf WAR-1

He's been in the service for many years, and though he's not near retirement age - he's stated that he won't be re-enlisting, because --in a nutshell --- "..things are f*@ked up..."

[radfringe]

3. interesting snip

For a soldier, accustomed to regular, long-planned-for rotations, this makes the operation seem overwhelmingly open-ended-and is crushing to morale. "They feel overused, and under-appreciated, particularly in the enlisted ranks," Wilson said. Christopher Parker, a former Army captain and a political scientist at the University of California-Santa Barbara, put it to me more bluntly: "What we're seeing now is almost unprecedented, this widespread sense among people in the military that they're being jacked around."

Smaller slights have taken their toll, too. Those troops who have stayed in Iraq have been doing jobs that they have not been trained to do--most notably, combat units are doing peacekeeping. Just weeks after Condoleezza Rice promised that American troops would not be used to "escort Iraqi kids to kindergarten," newspaper photographs showed that they were doing exactly that. When Special Forces needed to be moved from Afghanistan to Iraq this summer, they were replaced by reservists who had been trained to speak Spanish and Russian. "There's a sense from everyone I talk to, even down at the unit level, that whoever planned this war simply had no idea what we were getting into," a retired Army captain told me.

[wyldwolf]

4. Good news for Clark, Kerry...

[jiacinto]

5. I hate to say this

But it's also blatant that some on the left are simply hostile to the military and that's why we may not be connecting.

[gulliver]

6. The GOP loves its bird dogs.

"Go get 'em, boy! Hunt birds! Hunt birds! Hunt birds!"

"Blam!!! Good dog! Fetch 'im! Fetch 'im! Good dog!"

"We chickenhawks love and respect these fine animals, " says Cheney. "Who else would run into the briars for us cowards and come back with a bloody tail wagging happily like they always do. Pat pat. I love my doggies."