Not what the media elites would like to believe they are:
It should no more be necessary to write this article than to prove that there were Jews killed in the World Trade Center on 9/11. And yet the mythology refuses to die. Just last week, two well-educated and well-known writer acquaintances of mine remarked in passing on the “fact” that those who serve in the U.S. military typically have no other career options. America’s soldiers, they said, were poor and black.
They don’t mean this to denigrate their service—no, they mean it as a critique of American society, which turns its unemployed into cannon fodder. Especially today with high unemployment, the charge goes, hapless youths we fail to educate are embarking on a one-way trip to Afghanistan.
These allegations—most frequently leveled at the Army, the military’s biggest service and the one with the highest casualty rate—are false.
Read on to learn the real numbers, if you care.
Journalists obviously don’t seem to.
The same old scat. There was a lot of this back in the 70s during the Viet Nam war. They were trying to stop the draft then. What are they trying to do now?
Just being the usual Liberal/Progressive/Fachists.
Why would any journalist worth his salt give a damn about the facts?
Certainly didn’t stop them from endorsing and praising P.BO; why would it stop them now. They want the kind of country that P.BO wants for us – they want us to be racist socialist.
Well Said, Madam!
My unscientific but first hand experience (USMC only) goes even further – if you continue the breakdown into MOS, it sure seems that whites are even further over-represented in the combat arms, whereas blacks gravitate to the combat service support jobs. I admit this could be completely wrong, but it sure *seems* that way when you go around to the different schools and different units. So the lie that only poor blacks are fighting and dieing seems even sillier.
For example – quick look at morning formation at MC Engineer School (mostly CSS) – overwhelmingly dark green Marines, as opposed to SOI West, mostly light green, and finally BRC – all light green. Never quite knew what to make of that.
No, that is correct. I did some research on that about five or six months ago. Whites are over-represented in all combat positions. Blacks are under-represented. That’s per DoD numbers.
Dark Green Marines – and in Army – gravitate to CSS because they are looking for marketable, post-USMC skills.
Crackas just crazy.
That BRC thing. Dark green Marines and pools don’t mix.
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I couldn’t have said it better myself!
Man, I have NO idea why the trackback went FUBAR like that…
Harking back to 1947, I remember watching the only TV in our dorm while the Nurenburg trials were going on. General Eisenhower had realized that future Americans might forget what the Holocaust was, and what the killing ovens and dreadful conditions at Auschwitz and Buchenwald actually looked like, so before he cycled our troops home, he ordered that large numbers of them [sorry, I don't know how large the units were] to be directed through the concentration camps to view the horror. My brother, who was an artillery-man, was taken through one of the camps and never never forgot. What Eisenhower was trying to accomplish was to insure that enough Americans actually saw the evidence on the ground, so that when the post-war trials were carried out, they, and we civilians, would have to recognize that this appalling outrage actually did take place, and that the Germans would not be able to deny it.
Sad to say, the Enemy is still denying it, as they did in the Nuremburg trials. The Liberal Fascists are still having their way, and some crazy professors in California [but I repeat myself, as Twain said] are claiming that the Holocaust never happened.
Take my word for it. Sickeningly enough, it did really happen. And the images haunt me still.
Marianne
A journalist is nothing more than a person equally incompetent in all fields.
A reporter does what is necessary to find out the facts, and writes them down for publication.
A journalist? Not so much.
Jeff:
It’s really worst that that. A journalist is deliberately and intentionally ignorant. It take real and intensive effort to be that way.
Paul
I’ve been a part of our military for nigh onto fifty years now–the last 22 in the Pentagon. The “kids” I encounter daily are the best, most articulate, well educated, and motivated I’ve ever known. When I go to a test site, I encounter serving Marines who reflect the same qualities. Were I to venture into some lair of journalists, I suspect I would not be impressed the same way.
Tom
Anyone that thinks the troops are dummies needs to be around when there’s work to be done and watch the creativity with which those junior guys avoid said work.
Did you just say they are characteristically cunning and devious, and bear constant and careful scrutiny at all times?
Blacks used to be overrepresented in the paratroops (as a %of the national population) because of lure of the jump pay–but I guess the economics of today, unlike the 40s, 50s, 60s make that a much smaller financial impact, as blacks no longer flock even to the paratroops.
Um…are you saying that black men can’t jump?????
VX – until Truman desegregated the Army, you found NO blacks in airborne units. So as far as the 40s, not so much.
Historic note: There was one all black airborne regiment, which was sent to be smoke jumpers in the Pacific Northwest, since a lot of the smoke jumpers had enlisted and gone airborne. Had the Jap transpacific balloon bomb been more successful, we would have heard more of them. They were busy and doing useful, honorable, hazardous duty – not shoveling **** in Louisiana. Heroes,just not war heroes.
The Jap’s ballon bomb offensive killed part of a Sunday School picnic late in the war. There are likely still a few of the bombs, undetonated, in the remote mountain forests, so they may kill a few more hikers in the next fifty years or so.
But I digress…
Grandpa, iirc, that was the 555th – “the Triple Nickel” — formed from Black troops at Benning who started training on their own initiative, and kept at it until the Powers-That-Be noticed and formalized it.
While fighting forest fires was necessary, the employment of the triple nickle was a waste of fine troops. They had high morale and almost no disciplinary problems. Triple nickle vets later showed their fighting abilities in Korea.
Meme uber alles.
s/
Just another loser who had no other options
I get really pushed out of shape when idjits like Matt Damon repeat the party line of only kids who can’t do anything else serve in the military. Some of the best and brightest kids I’ve been privileged to know through Civil Air patrol or my kids High School have gone to Academys, ROTC or enlisted. And skin color or ethnic group doesn’t make a difference.
Some of the ones who have gone directly to the local university couldn’t qualify for shift manager at a fast food restaurant, but that’s another story.
By the way, I wonder if the other services, besides the Army, also put lie to the liberal thinking?