State Dept and Defense Dept Show Their Colors
What a dichotomy of service and sacrifice we have in the news this week. “Diplomats” in the State Department who refuse to serve in Iraq and soldiers in the Defense Department who cheat to pass medicals to stay in Iraq.
October 31, 2007
New Iraq policy prompts angry words at the State Department
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Calling it “a potential death sentence,” several hundred diplomats expressed their resentment Wednesday over a new State Department policy that could force them to serve in Iraq or risk losing their jobs.The sharpest comments came from Jack Croddy, a 36-year veteran of the Foreign Service.
To loud applause from his fellow workers, he asked how the State Department could protect people in Baghdad or the Iraq countryside when “incoming is coming in every day. Rockets are hitting the Green Zone.”
“It is one thing if someone believes in what is going on over there and volunteers,” he said, “but it is another thing to send someone over there on a forced assignment. And I’m sorry, but basically that is a potential death sentence and you know it. Who will raise our children if we are dead or wounded?”
November 6, 2007
Troops cheat on brain-injury tests to stay with units
WASHINGTON – “Troops in Iraq and elsewhere have tried to avoid being pulled out of combat units by cheating on problem-solving tests that are used to spot traumatic brain-injury problems, military doctors say.
New versions of the tests were sent into Iraq late last month to prevent the cheating, says Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Jaffee of the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center in Washington, D.C.
“With highly motivated individuals, be they athletes, be they our service members in harm’s way, there is a motivation to stay with the unit and stay on the job or stay in the game,” he says.
The tests, administered by medics in the field, are the military’s primary means of uncovering subtle signs of brain injuries from exposure to blasts.
Reports of cheating began surfacing in Iraq during the summer, says Col. Brian Eastridge, a trauma surgeon who supervises medical care in Iraq and Afghanistan from his office in Baghdad.”
Words to describe the despicable, sniveling actions of cowards like State Department Jack Croddy, a mouse of a man who has been living off the largesse of the American taxpayer for 36 years, fail me. I’m trying to keep this blog “clean”, so I can’t say what I’d really think of Croddy and his “applauding fellow workers.”
My feelings echo those of John Carey, here… who knows more and writes better that I do. What I do know is that Croddy and the rest of those self-indulgent, duty-shirking prima donnas took virtually the same oath to defend this nation as did those troopers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Democrats say we send our children to Iraq. Not so…the children are in the State Department; the adults are in in Iraq.
