Phony Soldiers

[MKSheppard]

Yeah, some dude named RogueIce. But we decided to just make him our mascot.

Ow, that's cruel, Lonestar! Just think of Poor Mikey! You'll destroy his self esteem!

[Ender]

First thing I found on Sen. Harkin.

So an Op-Ed writer for the Wall Street Journal claims David Broder accurately quoted Tom Harkin, and uses this quote in an editorial page hatchetjob on Harkin? The same WSJ editorial page that ran all those absurd lies about John Kerry's war record? Even if you assume (a) Broder is a reliable journalist and (b) that a WSJ hack is entirely honest in his smear job, the "evidence" is just pettifoggery about how many times Harkin flew into Vietnam, or whether he should have said he served during Vietnam (referring to the war) instead of in Vietnam (the country).

I would still like an answer to my question - what points in the book are incorrect?

[Elfdart]

I would still like an answer to my question - what points in the book are incorrect?

The part where he claims (based on Lewy's lies) that the Winter Soldiers were fakes. If you had bothered to read the first page and followed the links to excerpts from his book you would know that.

[MKSheppard]

I got Stolen Valor from my library, and will read it tonight, and let you all know the straight dope on Elfy's claims.

[MKSheppard]

First impressions, it's a good read, and has some surprises about books I'd heard of having bullshit accounts by fake vets. Among those was Al Santolini's Everything We Had -- Despite Santolini being a nam vet himself, a fake or two managed to worm their way into his collection of oral narratives about Vietnam.

You could pretty much open the book to any of it's 600~ pages and find some interesting little story or factoid.

It's got the single most awesome tidbit I have ever found on Agent Orange.

The Ranch Handers (the people who sprayed the stuff all over Nam), due to all the hullaboo over AO by the anti-war people during Vietnam, actually incorporated the use of Agent Orange into their induction rites for new pilots.

They'd drink the stuff straight, same mix used in the sprayers; and kept a record of how much they drank. Some people drank a gallon of the stuff.

It gets even better--because they had to fly low and slow in order to deliver the stuff evenly; they were the most heavily shot at people in Vietnam, one plane got hit something like 800 times.

As a result of this, the tanks in back would be always riddled and leaking, sloshing the stuff around.

A study found that while some Ranch Handers had a dioxin level 617 times the national average, there were no detectable increases statistically in cancer or birth defects amongst the Ranch Handers; despite them swimming in the crap daily -- being the most heavily contaminated people in the war -- the flow rate for AO and other herbicides was 3 gallons an acre; the majority of it was soaked up by the upper canopy layer of the jungles -- US troops were not allowed to enter a sprayed zone until 6-8 weeks later.