However, not once did Biden – nor Defense Secretary Leon Panetta — mention Afghanistan’s dirty secret – a large number of pedophiles and pederasts among the Afghan male population.

Pedophilia is a widely-accepted practice in southern Afghanistan, where “boys are given to older men for the sexual gratification of the elder and the sexual education of the child,” say many returning U.S. troops.

Afghans say pedophilia is most prevalent among Pashtun men in the south who comprise Afghanistan’s most important tribe.

Apologists say that Bacha Bazi or ‘Boy Play’ is a very old cultural practice in Afghanistan and part of that nation’s mainstream.

I have written about Bacha Bazi several times. You can find them at www.bouhammer.com/?s=bacha+bazi. I have also written about how rampant homosexuality is in Afghanistan (www.bouhammer.com/2010/01/and-you-thought-i-was-lying-about-man-love-thursdays/).

PBS has done a full Frontline special on Bacha Bazi and many more people know about it today than they did back in 2006.

In a country that is considered overly repressive due to its adherence to the precepts contained in the Muslim religion’s Koran, it’s difficult for American service members and diplomats to understand the fact that a large portion of the Afghan male population are pedophiles (adults who enjoy sexual contact with prepubescent children) or pederasts (adults who enjoy sexual relations with pubescent or post-pubescent children).

While Muslims in Iraq have on several occasions stoned homosexuals for their sexual activities, not all Muslims believe pedophilia is a violation of Sharia law.  Those who believe in the sacredness and infallibility of the Koran adhere to the teaching that women are sub-human and quasi-slaves, and therefore Muslim men will look for relationships — even sexual relationships — with others of their own gender.

According to Reuters, there is a lot of homosexuality going on in Afghanistan, but those engaging in it don’t think of themselves as gay, so that makes it okay since Islam officially disapproves of the gay and lesbian lifestyle.

I saw it first hand and I still struggle with it today. How could I sit back and know this was happening but never say anything. But then again I saw lots of shit that was horrible. I saw parents and big brothers beat the crap our of their children. I don’t mean on the butt with a belt, I mean in the face with a fist. I saw Dads with 2-3 kids with them on a motorcycle, and none of them had a helmet on. I will also never forget the day we were coming back from a missing and happened up on an accident. Two guys, one about 20-24 and one about 14-15 were on a motorcycle. They went off the road and the younger one was all tore up. He had compound fractures with exposed bone and skin taken off his body everywhere. The older one was not complaining at all, and that was because his brain was literally laying next to him on the ground. His head hit the corner of a concrete culvert and it split him open like a watermelon at a Gallagher show. His skull was cracked wide open and this brain had become separated and flew out of his head.

Yep, I will never forget that at all. I wrote about it right after it happened. You can read it at www.bouhammer.com/2006/11/saw-something-the-other-day/

Back to the topic at hand. The bottom line is the Afghan people accept this type of behavior, regardless if they will admit it or not. Also regardless of what any non-afghan thinks. Trust me, I can’t grasp it. How do you treat your women so shitty, yet are so worried about them being seen by anyone that you would kill over it. Do you respect them or have no respect? Which one is it? How can you care so much about the life and safety of your children that if they are accidentally hurt or killed in the war that you will damn near riot over it, but on the same day your daughter is kit by a car and you bring her to the Americans for medical help and when she dies you walk away saying “En Shala” (It is God’s Will) and have a don’t give a shit attitude.

 ”They regard themselves as non-gay because they don’t “love” the sex object so Allah is happy. These are the men who avoid their wives as unclean. Apparently there is very little love of any kind in Afghanistan, which explains a lot,” according to Reuters.

“Having a boy has become a custom for us,” Ena Yatullah, a 42-year-old in Baghlan province, told a Reuters reporter. “Whoever wants to show off should have a boy.” [. . .]

How can you consider yourself a child of God and all your fellow muslims as children of God and then you do horrible things to children because you have somehow justified it in your head as “non-gay” and your trophy to show off.

See I was there and I don’t understand it. So I know there is no way any one who hasn’t been there is going to understand it. It just makes me shake my head and feel really bad for kids in Afghanistan, boy and girl alike. They are born with the cards stacked against them.

All I can do is hope that God has a special place in hell for people who do these types of acts, and Satan has the doors open waiting to great them. And when it happens, well….. En Shala Mother Fu#$er.

EMF All the way…

NY 27th BCT ETT Team 4.75 EMF Guidon

Read the entire story at www.examiner.com/law-enforcement-in-national/afghan-pedophilia-a-way-of-life-say-u-s-soldiers-and-journalists

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Let me be clear, Mike Yon was in the Army. He was in Special Forces for a short-time period. Actually his time in the Army was short. He also killed a man in bar-fight right after earning his Green Beret. Good for him for his short service, at least it was service. Shame on him for bringing embarrassment to the Army for killing a civilian in a bar-fight. He never served in combat, but that is ok. There are many that have never served in combat.

So lets look at these credentials. He knows good military training, from back in the day. He also knows how to take another person’s life, granted not for good or justifiable reasons.

He has also been dis-embedded from multiple units in Afghanistan and is pretty much not being allowed back into country now to embed with anyone. It could be because he crosses over to what could be considered as unethical stories. He has been accused of violating operational security. He has also lashed out at any military command that does not allow him to embed (he did this with the Navy after the Japan disaster and the Army multiple times).

But like I said at least he has served. He belongs to a long list of great people that have served this country. However serving does not make you above the law, or perfect, or right in every situation. Just ask Lynddie England, Timothy McViegh, or Bradley Manning. They all have served in the Army. Does that make them great people that deserve respect regardless of what they have done? I think not.

Anyway, for some reason Mike Yon who has never served in combat, but has embedded with many military units in combat is now a subject matter expert on the use of MEDEVACS and how they are marked and what their mission is in combat. I have never played professional football but I have been to many games and have hours playing EA’s Madden football game on my computer and Xbox. That does not make me subject matter expert on how to play or what it is like or what plays to call. Just an analogy there on how stupid it is for anyone to listen to Mike Yon and his full-of-shit opinion about strategy and doctrine. He is nothing more than an arm-chair general who thinks he is in the “know” and is so full of himself that if he could get through life with making love to himself, I think he would. 

Mike has capitalized on an incident that happened while he was embedded in Afghanistan before he was kicked out. He is on a kick to try and get the Army to remove the red crosses from the MEDEVAC helicopter and to arm them like CASEVAC helicopters are some times. You may be asking, what is the difference? Let me point you to Aerovac World, which is a social networking site for professionals in the Aerovac Evacuation industry. You can find more at www.aerovacworld.com/showthread.php?221-Difference-between-CASEVAC-MEDEVAC-and-AEROVAC

CASEVAC
CASEVAC uses non standardized and non dedicated vehicles that do not provide en route care. The service exists to transport casualties that are in dire need for evacuation from the battlefield and do not have time to wait on a MEDEVAC, or where a MEDEVAC is unable to get to the casualty. Essentially it is any helicopter or vehicle that can get into an area and evacuate an injured member with or without a medical crew and/or equipment.

According to AFTTP3-42.5
Casualty evacuation (CASEVAC), a term used by all Services, refers to the movement of unregulated casualties aboard vehicles or aircraft.

MEDEVAC or DUSTOFF
The Army has a long history of medevac via helicopter starting with the 57th Medical Detachment back in 1962. The history of the DUSTOFF mission can be found on their website www.dustoff.org/history/history.htm

DUSTOFF is a standardized and dedicated vehicle providing en route care. They are traditionally on UH-1 Huey’s and UH-60’s Blackhawks. They can be easily identified with the Red Cross symbol on the nose and sides of the helicopter. One other identifiable mark with medevac’s is they do not have gunners aboard like the Air Force medics had. DUSTOFF medics are extremely skilled at what they do and are highly regarded as some of the best medics around. For more information about DUSTOFF, please visit www.dustoff.org.

According to AFTTP3-42.5
Medical evacuation
(MEDEVAC), on the other hand, traditionally refers to US Army, Navy, Marine Corps, or Coast Guard patient movement using predesignated tactical or logistic aircraft temporarily equipped and staffed for en route care. MEDEVAC has generally implied the use of rotarywing aircraft with medical attendants (MA).

Air Force Medevac
The Air Force doesn’t traditionally fill a medevac role but in 2006 the Army asked the Air Force to help with its medevac mission, it was considered an in-lieu-of deployment. The first medics that took on this responsibility were then TSgt Mark D. and TSgt Shawn B.. In order to fill the role, they needed to qualify on the helicopter and attend survival school.

Because the Air Force normally doesn’t carry out the medevac mission, it doesn’t have a helicopter designed for that purpose. This meant the flight medics had to make do with what they had, the HH-60 Pave Hawk, a helicopter the Air Force uses for combat search and rescue missions. It, too, is a distant relative of the Army’s Black Hawk.

I hope that explains it a little better and offers more clarity. Medevacs are not armed with weapons as they are armed with life-saving equipment. A CASEVAC is any type of transport available. It could be another helicopter, a HUMVEE, or hell even a civilian vehicle if that is all that is available. It is a means to transport a wounded warrior. In war zones just about every vehicle has a weapon on it. Some don’t, especially those that have a unique or specified purpose. For example, the Buffalo MRAP, The Husky or MEDEVAC birds. They are specialized, they have a unique application and it is more important that they carry what they need to do their job versus trying to fill a mission they are not destined for.

So when SPC Chazray Clark’s widow, Christine asks the question I would hope that someone could get to her and explain the answer. Someone besides Yon who is doing nothing but taking advantage of her and her grief.

“I just don’t understand why — can’t they take the red crosses off,” she said, “and put machine guns on them? Why do they have to wait for somebody to escort them?”

If a MEDEVAC is carrying weapons and ammunition, then how are they supposed to carry all the life-saving medical equipment they are required to carry? Remember they are designated to provide en-route care and not just evacuate the wounded from the battlefield.

Former Afghanistan Commander and RESPECTED military leader LTG John Campbell makes it pretty clear.

 …Lt. Gen. John Campbell says it would not save more lives.

“I don’t think arming a medevac bird or taking a cross off a medevac bird will change whether or not we can get in and save our soldiers,” he said.

Machine guns would add weight and reduce the number of patients a medevac could carry and would not bring nearly as much firepower as an Apache escort. Today in Afghanistan, a wounded soldier stands a 92 percent chance of surviving — the highest rate of any war. Campbell, a former commander in Afghanistan and now chief of army operations, says that is the best argument for unarmed medevacs.

Because they don’t have weapons on board, the Army requires that armed helicopters go with the unarmed MEDEVACS anywhere they go. Regardless of what the non-combat veteran Mike Yon says those red crosses don’t invite more gunfire onto the helicopter due in large part because there is always an armed Apache, Blackhawk or even a Chinook helicopter with them.

What amazes me is that a guy who flip-flops on whether or not he is a journalist or blogger or whatever the flavor of the day is, a guy who killed a innocent person in a bar-fight, a guy who has been thrown out of embed after embed with the military can somehow have the ear of Fox News and of many elected Congressman and Senators. Why do they even give him the time of day much less help spread the lies and fallacies that he has made up in his little fat head.

I have been on the business end of more MEDEVACS then I care to remember. I have called in many and then had to wait and provide care and comfort to the wounded, keep security up  and also re-assure his buddies that the bird was coming. In fact one one day I had two MEDEVACS just about 90 minutes apart. Lucky for Mr. Yon he has never had to experience that, he has only had to watch from the sidelines through his lens and then sharpshoot and ridicule the entire process.

Please do me a favor, if you agree with what I say and have the common sense to see the difference between the different means of getting wounded off the battlefield, leave a comment here or better yet send your Representative or Senator a comment about it.

You can also read more and see a CBS video about this at www.cbsnews.com/8301-18563_162-57362374/did-military-rules-cost-a-soldier-his-life/

DISCLAIMER- In case it was not clear, I can’t stand Mike Yon, the ground he walks on or the oxygen he steals from the rest of us. I don’t give a crap what he thinks about me, and never will. To put it into perspective, if his body was on fire and his head was ripped off…I would piss down his neck-hole but not on his body because it would put the fire out.

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Watch this great video from the NRA on Gunsite Academy in Arizona and how once a year they invite military members out to take part in their advanced shooting courses free of charge. In my opinion, it is Gunsite’s way of making sure more of our guys come home and more of the Tangos don’t.

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Blogger “Crush” at blackfive.net also wrote about this recently but focused more on how the US military leadership has tried to somewhat hide the details of when our military sons and daughters are cut down by the “allies” we work to train befriend.

Head over to www.blackfive.net/main/2012/01/afghan-soldiers-killing-record-number-of-advisors.html and give it a read. One point he raises which I think needs emphasizing is that our military should be honest and straight with America and not have the New York Times or all outlets dig in and reveal the truth.

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However that was while I was active and I only had limited visibility of the National Guard and well, that visibility was not always good. Once I came into the National Guard I found there were many professional and technically expert soldiers who called the National Guard home. I have served with some awesome and highly motivated soldiers in the National Guard and I have also seen some pieces of crap (both soldiers and leaders). However I had also sen plenty of bad soldiers when I was active duty too.

After 9/11 the game changed, the “weekend warrior” was dead once our op-tempo kicked into high gear overseas while we also took on many new unforseen homeland security responsibilities. In 2003 my company deployed to NYC 3 times with two times having less than 12 hours notice. Think about that for a second. One day my soldiers left their campuses, cubicles, work-places, etc. thinking they were going home for the night and would be back the next day only to get a phone call telling them to bring any gear they had from home and report to the armory. I remember being on a bus to NYC handing my cell phone to soldiers so they could tell their bosses they would not be in to work and were not sure when they would be back. In addition to those homeland deployments, we also went to Germany for 3 weeks to help train up an active duty Brigade for an Iraq deployment and we were alerted 4-5 times ourselves for deployment. The last alert in November of 2003 finally came to fruition and most of the company deployed in January 2004.

We went from the standard “2 weeks a year” implying the amount of annual training we did and the longest timeframe we would be away from our families, work, college to “2 weeks a year” which now meant how much R&R leave each soldier would get at home to be with family.

The US Army leaned hard on the National Guard as two war fronts were happening in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Those, in addition to other deployments like Kosovo, Sinai, Gitmo. That is not even the homeland missions like Noble Eagle, wildfires, floods, ice storms and of course hurricanes.

National Guard troops in a Humvee guard a Wal-Mart which had been closed and fortified against Hurricane Gustav on September 1, 2008 in downtown New Orleans.

 So for the years of 2003-2011 the National Guard was shoulder to shoulder with active forces. This was a great thing for the Guard because it forced the National Guard to flush its ranks of poor performing soldiers and get the “ghost soldiers” off of its rolls. There were many times when I had Active Duty leaders tell me they could not tell the difference between their soldiers and National Guard soldiers. The National Guard had earned the respect they deserved and accomplished pretty much every mission they were handed.

However lately I am starting to question the integrity of our DOD leadership as the National Guard appears to being put on the back-burner again. Almost like they are not worthy of being in the 1st class cabins anymore, but are being put down below the upper decks with the 2nd class guests.

The 27th BCT out of NY was scheduled for Afghanistan again, after getting back from there in January 2009 and now instead of going there they are going to Kuwait to sit on a huge camp and secure gates and towers. This is a Brigade whose soldiers were some of the first to respond to Ground Zero in NYC (before being ordered or asked to) and stayed there and in many other sensitive places around the city and the state for years. They have deployed several times on both stateside and overseas missions. They have a wealth of combat experience, yet now they have been given one of the worst deployment assignments there is. They will be doing the crap jobs and being the whipping boy for CENTCOM for a year protecting a humongous camp in the relatively peaceful Kuwait.

The 37th BCT out of Ohio was at the National Training Center in California when they got re-missioned like the 27th BCT. They were gathered up and asked who wanted to go home. From what I understand about 900 soldiers opted to go home rather than get stuck in some country waiting out a year away from their families for no good reason. Now the way I understand it, some of the 37th BCT soldiers will go into Afghanistan to perform mundane duties, but the rest will get stuck in a country in the mid-east to wait out their time.

For me personally if I am going to be away from family, home and work for a year I want it to be for a good reason and not because DOD is forced to do something with me. If I am going to a war zone, I want to do my trained job and not a job that nobody else wants.

I hear there is a National Guard aviation Brigade whose mission is also up in the air now (forgive the pun). I realize that the ideal world would mean the Active forces could handle the workload of the overseas mission and the National Guard would just handle the stateside mission and be on-hand in case a natural disaster happens. However these are highly trained units with soldiers and families ready for the deployment. The units have already received their warning orders, equipment and have been preparing for over a year for this war-time deployment.

Why wouldn’t DOD keep them on the deployment track they had planned for them? Why push these units off to bogus countries to sit and waste time just to call up active duty units that probably weren’t planning to deploy? It makes no sense to me. The DOD knows over a year out who is on the “patch chart” and will be deploying. In the 5-sided puzzle palace they track the units, their readiness status and when they are up for deployment. It is called ARFORGEN in the US Army.

The only answer I can come up with is that DOD leadership is now back to looking at the National Guard as 2nd rate and not their first choice for the needs of the country. If my suspicions are true, then that is a very sad state of affairs. I will truly be let down by this lack of respect of some of our greatest fighting forces.

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The president of the American Psychiatric Association says he is “very open” to a request from the Army to come up with an alternative name for post-traumatic stress disorder so that troops returning from combat will feel less stigmatized and more encouraged to seek treatment.

Dr. John Oldham, who serves as senior vice president and chief of staff at the Houston-based Menninger Clinic, said he is looking into the possibility of updating the association’s diagnostic manual with a new subcategory for PTSD. The subcategory could be “combat post-traumatic stress injury,” or a similar term, he said.

“It would link it clearly to the impact and the injury of the combat situation and the deployment experience, rather than what people somewhat inaccurately but often assume, which is that you got it because you weren’t strong enough,” Oldham said.

The potential change was prompted by a request from Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army’s vice chief of staff, who wrote to Oldham last year, suggesting APA drop the world “disorder” from PTSD.

I am not going to say this came from me, however there are some interesting things that have happened in the past of which I am connected to. I have been saying for about four years that we should NOT use the “D” in PTSD for every soldier that has been diagnosed. I have made this statement in many public forums with the argument that people can suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress without having a disorder. I commonly call it PTS or more recently I have seen it called PTSS for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

On June 18th, 2009 we had GEN Chiarelli as a guest on You Served Radio where we talked to him about this stress, the Army’s Suicide problems, and many other topics. The discussion went extremely well and in all honesty was one of the most notable episodes of the You Served Radio show.

I didn’t get a chance to mention my feelings on dropping the “D” to him so there is no direct correlation however it has been something that I have pushed for a while and I am highly encouraged others like GEN Chiarelli are feeling the same way.

Oldham cautioned the discussion is very preliminary but speculated that a new subcategory like “combat post-traumatic stress injury” might work.

Although Chiarelli still would prefer to lose “disorder” entirely, he said a new subcategory would be a start. “I’m frustrated with how long this is taking to be honest,” he said….

….Chiarelli says his main concern is getting soldiers into treatment, so if calling post-traumatic stress a disorder keeps them from seeking help, then the wording needs to change, the sooner the better.

Read the whole story over at http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Idea-to-take-the-D-out-of-PTSD-studied-2556372.php

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Image courtesy of www.bigstockphoto.com

That was the saying I grew up with when one person or group accused another of something that the original party was known to be guilty of.

Afghan investigators accused the American military Saturday of abusing detainees at its main prison in the country, bolstering calls by President Hamid Karzai for the U.S. to turn over control of the facility and complicating talks about America’s future role in Afghanistan.

The investigators also called for any detainee held without evidence to be freed, putting the U.S. and Afghan governments on a collision course in an issue that will decide the fate of hundreds of suspected Taliban and al-Qaida operatives captured by American forces and held indefinitely.

I read this over the weekend and was floored. I could not believe that anyone in the Afghan Government could honestly make this kind of accusation with a straight face. This is a country that essentially has no military justice system so they lock up their soldiers for infractions in the same place that they lock up detainees, in a Conex container. A standard shipping container with no power, toilet, heat, etc. Yes when a commander wants to punish a soldier or group of soldiers they lock them up in there for hours to days at a time.

If they capture enemy on the battlefield and they can’t easily get them back for interrogation the Afghan Army (and I assume some of the police) lock them up in the same type of location.

Karzai took Washington by surprise Thursday when he ordered that the U.S. military turn over full control of the prison outside Bagram Air Base within one month, a seemingly impossible deadline given U.S. security concerns about the prisoners and the Afghan government’s weak administrative capacity. The countries had been working on phasing a transfer of responsibility of the prison, which hold 3,000 detainees, over two years.

Not only do they lock them up in conex container, among other places but they also abuse them worse then I have ever heard about in this country. This is abuse I have seen first-hand. 

Abuse like punching detainees with spiked gloves, kicking in the face, shooting,    or hitting them with an AK-47 like it was a baseball bat. We had one Afghan soldier we called Jose Conseco as a nickname because he would hit a detainee like he was knocking the ball out of the park. This type of behavior was considered standard operating procedure in the Afghan army.

I won’t even get into the details of the raping of detainees by Afghan soldiers, but it happened, and was considered as punishment for being an enemy. Yes that is the kind of stuff that happens. So who the hell does Karzai think he is?

Detainees would beg us to hold them and not turn them over to the Afghans. They feared for the lives, well-being and sanity if we turned them over and they should have. In fact that was the only good part of the abuse that the Afghans did to Afghans, it made the Americans the “good cop” because the Afghan Army and Police made themselves the “bad cop” by the way they acted. I would capitalize on this by going to a detainee and field questioning them after the Afghan security forces had finished abusing them and I would just treat them humane and justly. They knew I could influence the Afghan forces and I could take possession of them, so if they knew anything they would typically spill the beans.

As for them being guilty or not, I would say 80% of the time we PUCed (Person Under Confinement) someone, which is what we called it when we detained them they were innocent. For the few that did get handed over to the Afghan NDS (their version of FBI), many of them were released later as long as they signed a form promising they would never attack Afghan Security Forces or US Forces again. Yes you read that correctly, they just had to “promise” never to do it again.

You want to guess how many kept that promise?

Read the whole story at www.taiwannews.com.tw/etn/news_content.php?id=1808431

UPDATE- I just got word from a very trustworthy source that said this is all a result of two things. First is it appears that it is actually the ANP committing the violations, and not the US forces.  Karzai is trying to take control so that they can cover it up.

The other issue seems to be that the HVTs (High-Value Targets) from SOF (Special Operations Forces) go there and Karzai is pissed we won’t share the targeting intel with him or his government.

This goes along with exactly what I suspected. I was there in Sept 2010 and I can tell you the area where the prison is now, it top-rate. State of the art court rooms, plenty of trained prison guards and MPs and even housing was being built at the time for the families of the prisoners. It was for the families to stay in while visiting their loved ones who are our enemies on the battlefield. Yeah, that doesn’t sound too rough to me.

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Airborne All the Way Santa….

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February 17th can’t come soon enough. So mark your calendars and put me on the IN LOVE WITH block, because this film is going to rock your socks off. Don’t trust me, watch it below.

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The National Guard began on Dec. 13, 1636, when the General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony passed a law establishing formal militia companies.

For 375 years the National Guard has been serving this country well and still does to this day. However it is sad that lately it seems like our Department of Defense has been disrespecting our National Guard lately. More on that soon in a follow-up blog.

Until then, Happy Birthday National Guard

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