Michael's Dispatches
“Faggots” and Women are Unfit for Combat: The Face of a Broken Army
- Details
- Published: Wednesday, 03 October 2012 15:11
03 October 2012
Face of our Broken Army, and the Taliban's Best Friend
Grisham contacted a lawyer today, who contacted me. This must be hitting home. So let’s keep exposing what has gone wrong with our Army.
General (ret.) Barry McCaffrey warned us many times over the years that we are breaking the Army. Today, it appears that we have passed that point. Our signal-to-noise ratio now favors the noise.
The Taliban hardly needs to dress up like American Soldiers to hit our jets when enough real Soldiers do worse, all on official business. The Army pretends to have the luxury of sending liabilities to Afghanistan who have little better to do than post on Facebook, play at being journalists, and then claim to be under combat stress. Meanwhile, real combat troops go toe-to-toe with the Taliban 24/7.
One day, in 2011, Master Sergeant Grisham arrived at his safe desk on the giant base of Kandahar Airfield. Someone had tied a balloon with a smiley face in front of his computer. Maybe they were trying to rescue him from the doldrums of the nearby boardwalk, with its coffee shops, pizza joints, TGI-Friday’s, and the French Bakery on the corner. (It’s all there.)
This video shows Master Sergeant C.J. Grisham during his “combat” tour playing with his happy ball:
Direct Download link.
The guy never left base. Grisham saw zero combat.
In another video, Grisham bullies a Senior Citizen who appears to be about three times his age. It would have been a sight to see a young combat Marine happen upon Grisham bullying an older gentleman.
After bullying this gentlemen, who must be at least 90 years, as seen here, Grisham received numerous bad responses. Note: Grisham has many times stated that he believes that “faggots” and women are unfit for combat:
isaacdandn
this faggot doesnt have the resume to stand to this ww2 vet hahah he should relise afghanastan and iraq are nothing compared to what they faced in the ww2
chcknhawk [GRISHAM]
Well, I'll just turn your own words on you. this isaacdandn faggot doesn't have the resume to stand to this Iraq and Afghanistan vet. hahah. You should realize that your living room is nothing compared to Iraq and Afghanistan.
Grisham fails to mention that he was shipped home months early from his cushy office and happy balloon on Kandahar Airfield, after complaining of pressure from superiors. (Is this balloon indicative of the office stress he was referring to?)
The Army permits their guy to wear a uniform and publish such things. This makes Grisham an Army spokesman, though this is not his official job. Army spokesman Grisham is wont to fill my inbox with emails such as this:
“First of all, I have to say ‘fuck off!’ Actually, that's ALL I have to say for myself. What do you have to say for being a complete douche bag tool? Are you insinuating something or just trying to get me to fellate you?...”
Why do guys who so harp on “faggots” so often make homoerotic statements? Grisham’s friend, Uncle Jimbo, from Blackfive, once emailed, “Do you really want to bump dicks with me?”
These weird, homoerotic emails introducing thoughts of man-sex are…weird. It is sickening that these mibloggers keep proposing sex. They seem to think about man-sex constantly, something that crosses my mind about as often as turtle-sex. And so when these guys keep mentioning man-sex, it blasts off the page. Why are you always bringing up turtle sex!? I don’t want to be part of Grisham’s or Jimbo’s fantasies, but it might be good if they exchange email addresses and get to know one another better.
Whatever the case, if Grisham made a come-on like that to a female Soldier, saying “Are you insinuating something or just trying to get me to fellate you?” he might come up on charges. She would only have to FORWARD that to her commander. But I am just a writer so never mind.
How can we expect guys like Grisham to intimidate the Chinese or the Iranians? They’ll laugh harder than the Taliban are laughing, while our real and capable troops are used as political pawns, and fundraising props for the likes Soldiers’ Angels.
While I was trying to highlight the serious combat troops on the Afghan battlefields in 2010 and 2011, Grisham and his cronies would contact units I was writing about. Soldiers’ Angels trustee Matt Burden used his website to undermine coverage for combat troops. It is a fact that Soldiers’ Angels funneled money to at least one family member, and incurred thousands of dollars in bank overdraft fees. With all those millions of dollars flying around, and the jetsetting Angels, it is a wonder they have time for me. Money is the wind beneath their wings.
Grisham was a favorite of Soldiers’ Angels. They used his mouth and uniform to raise money, and therefore had a vested interest in bolstering his reputation. He was the guy with the bell and the bucket.
In 2011, Grisham’s subterfuge led to a physical altercation. A captain in Grisham’s club barged into my tent in Zhari—I had never met the captain before (or Grisham), and did not know the captain’s name or that he existed until that moment. This guy was from a Civil Affairs unit. Again, bad recruiting.
Grisham and the Captain -- a reservist who is a cop at home -- were Facebook buddies, and despite that I was pouring good press on 4-4Cav, they would stop at nothing to stop it. That’s right. These U.S. soldiers sabotaged good press that a combat unit was getting. I was forced to leave, and instead of writing about combat troops, I was dealing with the likes of Grisham, and their man-sex fantasies.
Physical threats and contact from the Army raises matters to a different level. A physical altercation in the U.S. is serious business. In a combat zone, physical altercations are grave moments. Misunderstandings can end poorly. This is not kindergarten. Armed men should not pretend that they are unarmed and that this is a sandbox or normal interaction.
That captain -- Grisham’s Facebook buddy -- was Civil Affairs. We expect CA to make the Pashtuns fall in love with us, or at least tolerate us without planting bombs. An idea behind CA is to create conditions that allow intelligence networks to germinate. Specifically not part of the CA job is to spontaneously pick fights with writers they never met, who one year later are still writing about it. We should not recruit people who are that dull and emotionally unstable, and certainly not officers.
When they treat an American writer like this – one who exercises recourse -- imagine what happens to Afghans when the cameras are off. My recourse is ink. Pashtun recourse is snipers and bombs. For every letter and punctuation mark in this dispatch, there were more than two bomb events in Afghanistan last year. That does not included firefights, rockets, Green on Blue attacks, other insider attacks, jets destroyed, and helicopters shot down.
Our Army is recruiting and retaining too much crud, while too many of the best troops leave, even during this hard economy.
Too many of our criminal-acting guys are turning friends into opponents, and neutral Afghans into blood-enemies. These people should be removed from uniform.
The asinine actions of people like Grisham and that captain translate into death and destruction for people who actually go to combat. They translate into little or no media coverage, which translates into our government being able to misuse and abuse troops.
There were about 16,000 Afghanistan bomb events in 2011. Yet we had zero – ZERO – HUMINT sources in Zhari in 2011. Grisham the HUMINT guy and his unit, were too busy with balloons and Facebook to get anything done or develop sources. The coward never left base.
Please let that soak in. Zhari was one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan, yet we had zero HUMINT sources. Grisham and buddies were too busy writing man-sex fantasy, and complaining about Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while insulting civilians and demanding respect for their military service.
Meanwhile, Army guy Grisham has become a burden even to Soldiers’ Angels. That is tough to do. He had been raising money for Soldiers’ Angels, yet recently they seemed to have scrubbed their website of his name, and he stopped raising money for SA. They have become mutual liabilities.
The stench is horrible. The road kill that Grisham has become stinks so horribly that the vultures at Soldiers’ Angels will no longer touch him.
SA founder, Patti Patton Bader, emailed this to me in August after getting caught funneling $75,000 in start-up money to a t-shirt company partially owned by her son Brandon:
“You are lying you fake, Brandon did not get the money for himself, it was for tshirts, Brandon was not the only one in company and it was fully disclosed YOU LIED AS YOU ALWAYS DO, by twisting and turning and the worst of it is, you think you are doing good, in a way you are donations are UP because of you so Thank you again. You lose Michael because we do what we say we do, if it is even close to something the public should know we disclose it. You are nothing but a coward.”
Such venom. Who would have known that vultures have fangs?
General McCaffrey was right. The Army is broken. It is dying. It is attracting flies. It is time that we end this war, cleanse ourselves from the vultures, annotate our lessons, and rebuild our Army before we face a truly serious enemy.
