@ lulu -- Nice to see you again. I've [almost] always enjoyed reading your posts over on the old forum. Welcome to the new forum. For the record, I have to agree totally with what you said to SwamP_ThinG there.

Yes, it's true. I have no doubt about that. They never even denied it (it was wise of them not to even attempt to) and they claim to have totally discontinued the practice now. I hope they have.

When I was in Vietnam the Special Forces units used to keep a friggin' fishbowl full of dexedrine capsules available for anybody that felt they needed them - they always kept the fishbowls next to the coffee urns in the communal mess hall. So far as I know personally, this was only done in Special Forces, Ranger and other long-range (behind the lines) reconnaisance units. I imagine that pilots in air units were offered them too, though I never actually asked. Some of the chopper pilots were notorious for regularly flying 15-20 hours straight without so much as a piss stop, which kind of makes you wonder. I really don't think that any other units dared offer those things openly like that, but they were always available on the black market. In fact you could buy any kind of drug you wanted just about anywhere over there. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong always smoked opium right before a fight, to help them get their courage up. You could actually smell it drifting out of the jungle around you, and then you knew for sure that they were coming very soon. Opium apparently kills pain, too, and they could get hit by bullets several times and hardly seem to even notice it.

I'll admit I sometimes helped myself to some of those bennies, especially when I knew I was going to be out in some remote and particularly nasty area for an extended period of time. You really had to be on your toes all the time on LRRP patrols. I can recall being so high on them on one particular snatch-and grab patrol (we went out to take a few prisoners alive and bring them back for the intelligence boys to play with) that while laying under a poncho alongside a Vietcong trail for about a day and a half it seemed to me that my senses were so heightened that I could actually count the number of mosquito's swarming around my head in the dark just by listening very carefully and sorting out each different insect's unique little buzz just by ear alone. Yowza. Of course I may have just been getting psychotic as hell from lack of sleep, which is exactly what happens to you if you take those things for too long.

I really don't think it's particularly wise to have combat pilots taking them - or anybody else for that matter, especially for an extended period of time. Genuine sleep-deprivation induced psychosis is never more than "one benny too many" away, they say (and they're right).

@ SwamP_ThinG

Maybe for the intelligence she might ultimately provide? Maybe as a hostage? Maybe as a bargaining chip to trade for their own prisoners eventually? Maybe just to fuck her to death later? Who knows? Maybe they were just nice guys, following the rules. I was not there, so I really can't tell you.

I do know that the Iraqi's there on the scene at the time have repeatedly credited the hospital staff with saving her life, in more ways than one, because they told the Iraqi soldiers she was too badly injured to be moved without killing her.

So...you would get out of your tank while they are firing RPG's at you, just to move a corpse? If the guy on the ground couldn't move his own head he must have already been dead, or very near it, right? What would be the point?

Do you actually have some specific proof to offer of this ever happening intentionally in Iraq? If you're going to point to that picture that I posted, well, those two guys were actually killed by a bomb from an aircraft that was striking a nearby target, while they were waiting to surrender to any US troops that they saw coming. They just never actually got a chance to, I guess, before the bomb hit nearby, decapitating them both instantly.

I don't know about you, but I'd expect a chicken truck to be full of chickens, myself. Wouldn't you?

Is there? How so?

The Iraqi's are notorious for fabricating, and for believing any rumor that makes them look good and us look bad. If you believe their blogs why don't you believe our blogs as well? Are you biased toward the one over the other or something?

No. Actually I did not know that. I thought you were from Spain for some reason. My bad. I stand corrected, and I apologize for my mistake.

As I said above; it was my mistake, and you have my apology. I retract my derisive jab, and I shall feel just as sorry for you as I do for us from here on out.

Great. Then you can report the real "truth" about everything that's going on over there back to all of us here, when you get there. We'll be looking forward to seeing if your current views are changed in any way by the actual experience. I'd be willing to bet my very last dime that they most definitely will be.

I probably shouldn't, I suppose. The original source of the article was the front page of Al Jazeera after all...and we all know they're nothing but a filthy Islamic fundamentalist rag. Right?

I do believe it tho, because our own news media carried the video of the Mayor's of Falluja's statement on the news here, too.

I agree.

The point is that we could easily have killed 100,000 and wounded a million, if we'd wanted to. In fact, we could kill them all, every man woman and child. But we haven't. We have tried to minimize casualties whenever possible.

I might point out that in Vietman we killed 1,100,000 and wounded more than 600,000. Just to give you some sense of proportion there...