It has come to my attention that certain scurrilous allegations are being made in a new book about my recent exclusives revealing the existence of the deadly terrorist Toploader Project, and about the undercover mission which formed the basis for my ground-breaking investigations.

I won’t lower myself to repeat those slanders here, because I don’t want to use this high-profile blog to give them a far greater platform than they would otherwise enjoy. A powerful stench emanates from this fetid and puerile book, set in a fantasy world of the author’s prodigiously diseased and inventive imagination. The writer perhaps thinks he’s being amusing, but this is the most dishonest, least funny book I have ever read. That such a tissue of lies and bile could be distributed by a seemingly reputable publisher is to me simply quite stunning.

It is my understanding that the author of these base suggestions is a failed “old media” newspaper reporter, embittered at having been supplanted by the rise of independent web-based commentators and analysts such as myself. Let him and his kind know this: as always, we at blow-back.net intend to ignore everything you say. Deal with it, loser!!

Posted in Embargoed Zone, Latest, Toploader   7 Comments

My fellow blow-backers.

It is with a heavy heart that I, Cass Umtak, former administrator of blow-back.net, address you today. I have just received information that both chills me and sickens me: Flint Driscoll, our beloved former comrade, leader and – yes, inspiration – has been unmasked as a traitor, a terrorist and a hater of the very freedoms that he once taught us to hold dear.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, Driscoll has for five weeks now been secretly held for interrogation in the federal government’s extra-territorial anti-terrorism facility in Guantanamo Bay, free Cuba.

Flint Driscoll, photographed this week in the recreation yard at Guantanamo

It seems that contrary to my last posting here, on December 5th, Driscoll was not rescued by American special forces in Afghanistan last month, but was instead captured by them. Far from being the investigative reporter, analyst and philosopher  that we took him for, a great wind of truth in the war against Islamo-fascism, it seems that Driscoll – or Abdullah Mohammed Salah al’Din, to give him his real name – was a deep penetration sleeper agent in the service of Al Qaeda, Iran, the French intelligence service and the global warming conspiracy. Like the traitor John Walker Lindh, he made his way to Afghanistan as an enemy combatant, with the cold-blooded intention of allying himself with the forces of evil that are ranged there against us our brave boys and women.

I know that this will be a hard blow for all of us. And many of you will be tempted to seek comfort in denial: why should we believe what the Obama regime and its Pentagon stooges have to say about Driscoll, when they have lied to us about so much else – Obama’s birthplace, the death panels for senior citizens, evolution, the 1992 World Series, UN black helicopters, the presence of captured Canadians at Area 51? We can’t trust a word these people say to us.

True. But when a US soldier, intelligence agent, Fox reporter or immigration official tells us that somebody is a Muslim terrorist and/or communist then it is our duty to accept that, and join together in patriotic hatred of that person, and anyone who seeks to defend  or excuse them: this is the American way.

Rot in hell, Flint Driscoll. You better hope they never let you out of Gitmo, because if you show your face round these parts again, we’re going to have us a lynching. Although obviously not the old-fashioned, discredited anti-negro type of lynching. That would be wrong. Instead, we are going to lynch Flint Driscoll. If he ever comes back here.

Signing off for the last time (I’m not even getting’ paid for this – just sayin’!)

Cass Umtak

admin, blow-back.net

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Great news, everyone! Flint has been rescued from the Taliban by US forces operating in north-eastern Afghanistan! It’s not official yet, but a couple of my go-to money guys on the Bachmann campaign, who are on secondment from Kellog Brown and Root, told me the good news off the record! Seems they got it direct from some other KBR guys who do some part-time wet work in the Khyber Agency, a couple of weekends a month.

Apparently, the Pentagon wants to keep a lid on the rescue for the time being, presumably so they can spin it so’s President Barak Hussein Osama gets all the glory. Flint is currently recuperating at an undisclosed offshore location, with the Democrats using the need to “debrief” him as a pretext for the delay in bringing him home.

Flint (left) chats with his American rescuers.

Anyhoo, what I can tell you for now is that Flint was rescued by a crack US Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kunar province, only a couple of kilometers from the border with the Pakistani tribal areas. The team was on a hearts and minds mission, handing out Christmas cards, hot dogs and Beyoncé merch to the local goatherds, when they found Flint hiding alone in a pit latrine.

Flint had cunningly disguised himself as a typical Afghan farmer/terrorist, complete with beard and AK47, in order to infiltrate the Al Qaeda command structure. So convincing was his disguise, and his mutters of “Death to the West”, that his rescuers gave him a stout beating before they  began to suspect that the man calling himself  Abdullah Saladin - doubtless hoping to maintain his cover, and continue his daring operation  - might in fact be Flint Driscoll, the celebrated US security affairs blogger who went missing in Waziristan five months ago.

To be on the safe side, they continued the beating, but were finally persuaded to run some checks when they discovered that the prisoner’s rifle was not loaded and that someone had removed its firing pin – presumably Flint had done so himself, to eliminate any risk of “blue-on-blue” friendly fire incidents. Also, the prisoner seemed to speak little Pushtu apart from a few extremist Islamic slogans, but he was heard to whimper to himself in American English.

The coalition forces took Flint back to their base where, after some more enhanced debriefing, he finally broke cover. It seems that Flint had successfully ingratiated himself with his original Taliban abductors but that, after several months embedded with them, he had awoken one morning to find that they and the entire population of their village, and their herd animals, had mysteriously sneaked off in the night. Abandoned alone on a freezing mountainside, Flint had to fall back on his extensive survival training. The next day, disoriented by hunger, cold and exhaustion, and maddened by isolation, he sought refuge in the pit latrine, where the US forces found him two days later.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be able to share this great news with anybody who might still be reading this blog! My information might be a little out of date by now – I actually heard a few days back, but I’ve been so busy with designing my Bachmann attack spots that I couldn’t find time to log on to blow-back.net (it would help if the big lunk had set up a direct debit for me – his checks stopped coming when the terrorists grabbed him in July!).

Anyway, let’s all rejoice that one of the stoutest defenders of global freedom is once again safe in US military hands! Better yet, his rescue comes just a few days before his 45th birthday, which takes place on Thursday or Friday this week, I forget which. You can probably look it up somewhere.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Cass Umtak (web admin, blow-back.net).

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From my window, I can see a garden… bright with flowers. Such lovely, gracile tulips… The Persians brought them here, with their poetry, and their light… It is Fall already in the high passes, and the smell of crisp poplar leaves melds with the wood-smoke on the fresh mountain air… Such simple graces. I feel I understand so much more now, insh’Allah. These people have taught me so much… And I too will have much to teach them.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images and cling,
The notion of some infinitely gentle,
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth and laugh:
The worlds revolve like ancient women,
Gathering fuel from vacant lots.

Death to the West! Slaughter all the pigs! Cut their throats and hang them by the heels! Allahu Akbar!

Cass, could you go by my house and check the mail box? Plus, I left a lot of dairy in the fridge, and it should be getting pretty gross by now.

Abdullah Mohammed Salah al’Din (Formerly, Flint Driscoll)

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Hello. Site administrator Cass Umtak here.

This is terrible, terrible news. Flint Driscoll has been abducted by Al Qaeda/Taliban elements and now faces death if we cannot find a way to save him. I am appealing to all readers of this blog to come together in a mass campaign to have him freed. I myself would be greatly honored to spearhead the effort to save this great man from the doom he now faces, doubtless with all the courage which we would expect from him. Unfortunately, I have just been recruited by some people sympathetic to the Bachmann campaign to help devise some viral attack strategies, so I won’t be able to do it. But if anyone else out there would like to step up for the big guy, contact me here at blow-back.net. I’ll keep an eye on the site from time to time, work permitting.

God bless you all. Cass Umtak.

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Please, give them anything they want. Signed: I, Flint Driscoll

Allahu akbar! God is greater than the enemy!  Having made his way under false pretenses to Ghulam Khan in Waziristan, the infidel in this photograph was heard to boast freely in the bazaar, the maidan, the hammam and the Starbucks that the infamous American murder attack in Abbottabad in May was a sham and a lie to boost the apostate Barack Hussein Obama, and that in truth our beloved leader and guide, Osama bin Laden, peace be upon him, is not dead, but is instead somewhere hidden in France! Clearly, only a high-level American/Zionist spy could have access to such top secret information about this evil conspiracy, and though he tried to change his story when our fighters apprehended him and questioned him,  it was too late by then for him to lie his way to safety.  We also found incontrovertible truth of the plot on two files on his computer, here, and here. Know this: if the beloved teacher Osama bin Laden is not returned to us safely and soon, this Godless American worm will pay with his vile head. Allahu akbar!

Personal message from Flint Driscoll:

Please for the love of God give these good and kind people everything they want. They have persuaded me to divulge the access passwords to my blog, twitter account, facebook page, and bank accounts, including the one which I am currently setting up with my new friend from Nigeria. They say that, armed with these codes, they are now in a position to launch a devastating cyber attack on Washington DC. Further demands and instructions will be posted here on this blog; I have obtained permission to help them with grammar and spell-checking, so as not to compromise the high standards you have come to expect of blow-back.net. I must go now: they are hitting my typing fingers with a knotted rope. Flint Driscoll.

Posted in Allahu Akbar!   1 Comment

Hello. Cass Umtak here, web master for blow-back.net. There is still no news of the whereabouts of Flint Driscoll who, you will recall, went on a facility trip to Afghanistan several weeks ago. If any of you out there in the Flintosphere have any word of him, please let me know here. I’m sure that Flint is fine – he knows how to handle himself – but it is truly tragic that we do not have him to guide us through these dark and turbulent times. God bless you all. Cass.

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Hi, y’all.

I don’t want to be alarmist or anything, but have any of you heard from Flint, lately? Just send me a message/feedback along the usual channels. I guess I’m stressing over nothing, but it sure would be a relief to hear that the big guy was still in touch.

Thanks, Cass Umtak

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Sad to say, dear readers, I may be out of touch for a week or two. I’ve had an e-mail from some friends of friends in Afghanistan, local freedom fighters who are promising me exclusive access on an embed mission across the frontier into the Tribal Regions of Pakistan (whoops! shouldn’t have said that!) I was a bit suspicious at first, but their e-mail mentioned a few mutual friends in the CIA, so I guess they  check out okay. Also, they’ve promised to reimburse me for my travel expenses – these blogs don’t come for free, brother – which proves they are serious people.

Anyhoo, I may be out of coverage for a few days of the trip, so I can’t promise to be able to offer my usual five star online commentary, 24-7. While I’m away the site administrator, Cass Umtak, will be fielding any enquiries etc, so please don’t be shy about getting in touch. Because blow-back.net never sleeps!

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about how new internet-based technologies are about to put paid to a golden age of reporting and commentary. The tech gurus would have us believe that old-school, experienced craftsmen will soon be dinosaurs, rendered irrelevant by the rise of interactive social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter.

Not so fast, my online Friends (and Followers). Your pokes and your hashtags may rule the roost at present, but social networks and citizen journalism are no replacement for old-fashioned, high-quality content generated in-house by dedicated full-timers. Which is why I firmly believe that, whatever the New York Times et al may tell you, blogging still reigns supreme.

Unsinkable, like Das Boot

You know me by now, dear readers: I don’t like to boast. But I was there at the start of the new millennium, in the heady dawn of the web-log revolution, one of a new breed of wide-eyed dreamers who dared to hope that we could take on and defeat the monolithic might of the discredited, liberal, dead-tree print media. We fought, and we won. All over the world, newspapers are closing down, one by one, as right-thinking people realize that anyone with a smart phone and a lick of common sense is better than the slouching, boozed-up “news-gatherers” who hold themselves out as the “gatekeepers” and “watchdogs” of “fact”. I mean, puh-leeze!

Now it seems that Rupert Murdoch, a man whom I have long admired, is finally coming around to my way of thinking. Taking the initiative, he has just proactively closed down the News of the World, a 168 year-old British-based tabloid: no doubt he will build on this promising start and purge his portfolio of further newspapers, probably in order of seniority. Next to go, the Times of London! One hopes its bastard New York offspring won’t be far behind!

Rupert Murdoch: Visionary, leader, entertainer and friend

The fact is that to a clear-eyed visionary like Mr Murdoch, this “phone-hacking” fuss is not a crisis, but an opportunity. While the Manchester Guardian was stirring everyone up with its hysterical blather about victims of crime and terror and their so-called right to privacy (maybe if we all had a bit less privacy, there wouldn’t be any crime or terror: ever think of that, victims?)  Mr Murdoch was craftily offloading his Myspace social network onto a pelvis-thrusting filth-merchant named Justin Timberlake. Good on yer, Rupe, mate! You know a dead dingo when you see one, and how to flog it!

Mr Murdoch is clearly convinced, like myself, that social networks and newspapers will soon be equally obsolete, thrust to the margins of public discourse by a rejuvenated phalanx of taut, penetrating blogs such as the one you see before you.

Now, I’ve had my problems with News Corp – as you will recall, I was recently “done over” (as I believe they say in Wapping) by one of its scurrilous London tabloids. Nevertheless, I feel in my heart that the architect of Fox News is a man of principle and of honor, and for this he will surely be rewarded, in this world and the next. The only way for you to go now is up, Mr Murdoch, and I’d love to come along for the ride! I hear you’ve lost a few good people lately, but if you ever need a new friend or, say, a consultant, you know where to find me (hint: www.blow-back.net!). Because you know darn well that I, Flint Driscoll, will always have your back!

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How gratifying it is to hear that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez has fallen out with Noam Chomsky, arch-propagandist of the crypto-Islamic leftist global elite.

Chomsky, previously a supporter of the rabble-rousing coup-leader, has given an interview accusing Chávez of amassing power in his own hands, intimidating the judiciary, and making an assault on Venezuelan democracy (whatever the heck that is).

Noam and Hugo sitting in a tree... T-I-F-F-I-N-G

This denunciation comes at a particularly difficult time for Chávez whom – it was revealed this week – has just had a cancerous tumor removed by his Communist buddies in Cuba.

The rift in the Chávez-Chomskyite axis has interesting possibilities for those of us in Washington who favor a return to a more robust engagement with our less-developed Hispanic neighbors.

Could it be that, having finally seen through the “progressive” credentials of his erstwhile hero, the biggest critic of America’s role in the western hemisphere will now experience a change of heart?

For all his past insults to the country and beliefs I love, I would be glad to have him on board.

True, Lt Colonel Chávez has brutalized and imprisoned his opponents, socialized large swathes of Venezuelan industry, and incited global revolt against America’s benevolent oversight.

But now that Chomsky no longer has his hooks in him, is it too much to hope that Chávez will live up to his underlying potential, and become exactly the kind of no-nonsense and proactive Latin leader that we used to have in the good old days, before Carter and Clinton wimped out on our Manifest Destiny?

Pick up the phone, Hugo. It’s time you came in from the cold.

As for you, Chomsky, somewhere out there is an ice-pick with your name on it.

Just sayin’!

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Until now I have resisted the mounting pressure for me to comment on the situation in Syria. I must admit that I have struggled to find a way to explain this highly complex problem in terms that you, the layman (and who knows, perhaps laylady) might understand. It is not sufficient to say, as we do of our Facebook relationship statii, that “it’s complicated”.

Fortunately, I have come up with an analogy that will serve to expose the anatomy of the crisis in terms that even a simpleton could not fail to understand.

I speak of the analogy of Schrödinger’s Cat. As everyone knows, Schrödinger was a physicist who dabbled on the side in veterinary science. He found that by locking a cat into a sealed, airless box for a defined period of time, he was able to induce in it a state of profound coma. The cat, in other words, was at once dead and alive, occupying two contradictory states at the same time. Even more remarkably, Schrödinger was able to demonstrate that the mere act of observing the cat’s state had the effect of changing that state. If he opened the box to observe the cat after, say, one minute, he found it to be in a highly agitated state. If he waited ten minutes, on the other hand, he would observe the cat to occupy a state of absolute inertia.

I simplify, of course, for your benefit: there is a lot of highly complex mathematics involved that need not trouble you. My point is this: 1. It is possible for a person to be two entirely contradictory things at the same time. And 2. It just depends how you look at things.

The person in question today is President Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s youthful dictator. I have never been to Syria – no doubt I am on a watch list at the airport, and then there’s the whole kidnapping risk, and the dangers of drinking non-domestic bottled water – but I have been blogging about the middle east for many years now, and few people outside the Center for Security Policy can have such a deep understanding and compassionate concern for the human tragedy now unfolding there.

Bashar al-Assad: Cat in a hot tin box

Because President Bashar al-Assad is a deeply tragic, conflicted figure. On the one hand he – like his father Hafez before him – is the leader of a corrupt and brutal minority regime, dependent for its survival on malign foreign interlopers: first, the Soviet empire; now, the fanatical, nuclear-armed ayatollahs of Iran, and their proxy Shia henchmen in Lebanon’s genocidal Hizbollah terror group. Together, they pose an existential threat to the very existence of America’s closest and dearest ally, plucky little Israel, which could at any moment be overrun by Syria’s massed tank legions, or incinerated by an Iranian first strike. Damascus also gives shelter to the exiled leadership of the Palestinian terror group Hamas, which continues to resist Israeli rule despite all that Israel has done for its Arab immigrant population. Which is just plain nasty, if you ask me.

But seen another way, Bashar is a decent, reluctant leader, summoned to the throne only after his elder brother died in a car crash. A self-declared reformist, he has, like his father, proved very sporting down the years about Israel’s rightful annexation of the Golan Heights, dashingly seized from Syria in a defensive proactive surprise attack in 1967. While he still complains about the Golan in public, Assad has in practice let things slide. Moreover, as a minority Alawite, allied to Syria’s other minorities – Christians, Shiites, Alevis, whatever you’re having yourself – Assad is a stout bulwark in defense of religious tolerance; a stern but fair ruler who resists the machinations of Syria’s lumpen Sunni Muslim majority.

Without Assad, our strategic position in the region would be gravely weakened: the Sunnis must never be allowed to take over in Syria, as they have already done, disastrously, in Turkey. Israel is, and must remain, the only democracy in the middle east. Because democracies are hard for us to bomb.

So what can we in the US do to resolve this contradiction? Do we back Assad, or bomb him? The answer, naturally, is to do both. I haven’t quite worked out the details yet, but I know from my extensive on-line research – I hate that term, “drone porn” – that we in the US (and Israel, of course) now have weapons so precise that we can use them to micromanage any local or global problem.

I shall tweet my friend Henry, who does publicity work for the Skynet Corporation, to dig up some more specifics on the latest drone warfare capability upgrades, but in the meantime let me sketch out a possible scenario: Bashar al-Assad throws open the French windows of his presidential palace, high on a hillside overlooking Damascus, and squints westwards towards Israel’s Golan Heights. He sets out across the lawn towards them, and instantly a small, non-explosive kinetic anti-tank missile, fired from a circling drone, crashes into the ground at his feet. Thinking better of his chosen path, he turns to the east. Wrong again: thither lies Iran. Another missile firmly but unmistakably interdicts his path. Where can he go next? South, to invade loyal little moderate Jordan, as his father once tried? Wham! Another missile at his feet. Dance, Bashar, dance!  It won’t take long before he gets the message, and knuckles down to fighting Islamic extremism for us, in Jisr al-Shughour, and Deraa, and Homs.

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Can it really be twenty years since I said farewell to arms? The calendar, alas, does not lie. Twenty long years, blowing in the cold, heartless, not-understanding winds of civvy street…

I guess I still have a lot of mental and spiritual baggage from my army service during Desert Storm. The Flint Driscoll who emerged from the VA hospital, still bruised by the accidental beating he received in a darkened store-room, was not the same naive and idealistic young reserve lieutentant who had landed in Ramstein Air Base only two months before. War made a man of me, but in ways that have scarred me until this very day. I still find it very difficult to talk about those times, apart those four novels I wrote, and the articles for The National Interest, and the biopic feature pitch that is currently still in Hallmark’s court.

If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t understand.

Now, though, after twenty long years, surely the time has come to purge myself of the psychic pain, and I fear that mere prose will not suffice. Only verse – blank or heroic – will bear the dreadful burden of my suffering, the profundity of my insights, the zen-like comprehension of the ying and yang of cruelty and kindness, life and death, loneliness and brotherhood, war and peace. I envisage a major and troubling retro-modernist verse cycle, analogous to Eliot’s The Waste Land, but without all the faggoty footnotes he added to explain the meaning. You wimped out, Eliot. Have the courage of your convictions. Besides, the kind of people who read poetry are happy when they don’t really get it.

It could take me a week, perhaps two, to knock-up an  Eliot/Pound-type epic, so in the meantime I’ll leave you with this. Okay, I didn’t write it myself, but I still can’t read it without crying.

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My opinion of the French is well-known. I have a poor opinion of the French. As for socialists, I can only refer you to my recent work of political philosophy, Our Friends the Arachnids, and to the fact that ants (clue: ants represent socialists)  are not arachnids, but insects. And insects are gross.

And yet I, Flint Driscoll, am not ashamed to call Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French socialist, my friend.

How can this be, you ask?

Let me put it this way: my childhood confessor, Father Xavier Mularkey SJ, was the first to instruct me on the mysteries of morality and religion. Taking me on his lap, he would patiently explain the ineffability of the Godhead. Is God to be understood as the Jehovah of our folk religion, a personable if volatile father figure who watches from the sky, policing a check-list of silly taboos? Or is He the God of Aristotle and Plato and Aquinas: the prime mover, a creature of pure light and logic, who set the universe in motion and otherwise minds His own business – in other words, the deity as He is understood by the higher class of philosopher and clergyman? Only a very special boy would understand this sort of thing, he told me. It would be our secret. Dear old Father Mularkey… To this day, I cannot think of him without tasting a phantom Oh Henry bar… But why does the recollection also make me wince? Oh bitter-sweet mysteries of memory and loss… Of course, Proust was also a French man, but from what I have heard, I fear he may have been a homosexualist.

A Mandela for the gender wars

There is nothing funny, on the other hand, about Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I first met Dominique at a dinner party in Georgetown, and after I overcame my initial froideur I soon came to see that his understanding of socialism is, like Father Mularkey’s interpretation of the Book of Deuteronomy, of a higher, more cerebral order than that of the canaille in the Parisian street. I shall always recall him on one delightful balmy night on a palm-fringed beachside terrace in Antibes, proffering me a Cohiba Churchill with a wink of his eye. “Care for a socialist cigar?” he asked, with a tinkling laugh, and although I had to refuse – that bastard Castro is still somehow alive, damn him – I couldn’t help joining in the general merriment. Thereafter, whenever we bumped into each other in the corriders of power, I would salute him as “Dom Perignon”. He always took it in good part, and had his own pet name for me: I cannot print it here.

Dominique loves the good things of this life, and it fills me with sorrow to see him dragged through the gutter by the legal commissars of the People’s Republic of New York. The allegations against him are of course bunkum: why would a silver-haired charmer like Dominique need to force himself on some scrubber who would surely have got down on her knees for the merest chance to be of service to such a man as he? The whole charade smacks of entrapment: I note that the complainant is 1. a member of a labor union and 2. from Africa. Her motives for wanting to smear the courageous leader of the International Monetary Fund, the institutional vanguard of the free market crusade, are therefore clear. All she needed then was an opportunity. When it was presented to her in the Hotel Sofitel, she took it with both hands.

It is true that Dominque Strauss-Kahn is, as his French friends have freely admitted, a man who deeply loves women. A man with a twinkle in his eye. On my first visits to his homes in Washington and Paris  he was a kind and attentive host to both my former wives (I speak of separate occasions, naturellement), personally showing them around the apartments while I was dispatched to the store to buy milk, or rawl plugs. It was not without a pang of male jealousy that I noticed how thereafter they would turn silent and pale when in his presence. He had clearly make an animal impression on their tender female natures, so much so that, on one facile pretext or another, they both refused to trust themselves alone with him. Indeed, my continuing friendship with him contributed to the strains that, alas, finally ended both my marriages. As for female domestics, they were so in awe of Dominique’s masculine charisma that they couldn’t keep their eyes off him, even if this meant moving around the room with their backs to the wall.

So let me say this now: Dominique Strauss-Kahn is innocent. I am as sure of this as I have ever been of anything. Which is very sure indeed. Free him, in the name of all that is true, and decent, and honorable. Free him, lest he become another Mandela. Free him. Free him now.

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It is with a heavy heart that I watch scenes of the “Queen of England”, Elizabeth Windsor, being shown around Dublin by fawning would-be courtiers from the bankrupt – morally and financially – Free State government. Was it for this that the Wild Geese spread the gray wing o’er every tide?

My own grandfather served in the Irish war of independence, and had to flee to the United States after it ended, hunted down by the treacherous Free State government. His crime? To act as a local scout and information-gatherer for a crack paramilitary unit that played a major role in the fight for Irish Freedom. Yes, my dear old Dad used to wake me up in the small hours of the morning, when he came in late from the bar, to tell me about the heroic work his father did for the bold Black and Tans. It is a phase of Irish history that I really must research some day. But time is always so short, when the wars of the present press in on one so…

I digress. If they have any pride left, the people of Ireland must rise as one and expel the hated Saxon monarch from their midst. I was heartened to see that a few, at least, of Eireann’s sons are still prepared to fight for her honor. How joyous it was to watch them on television, the flower of Irish youth on the lovely boreens of Dublin, proudly clad in their gaily-coloured track suits, throwing rocks and burning trash at the Free State police. Is there a pike yet in the thatch?

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I’ve just finished reading Matterhorn, Karl Marlantes’ critically-lauded and best-selling novel, reportedly based on his own service as an infantry officer with the US Marines in Vietnam’s de-militarized zone.

Matterhorn has been widely-praised for its unflinchingly realistic yet nuanced portrayal of the psychology and relationships of young men at the business end of a vicious jungle war.

I’m not so sure.

As I plowed through its seven hundred pages, more and more doubts came into my mind. The Marines of Marlantes’ fictional Bravo Company, One-Twenty Four Marines, are foul-mouthed, filthy, cynical, unpatriotic, unmannerly to their officers, ill-disciplined and sometimes downright cowardly. I may be ex-Army myself (Operation Desert Storm 1991: Ramstein Air Base; if you weren’t there you won’t understand), but I refuse to believe that the men of the USMC would ever sink to such depths. I have met many Marines while they were on active service overseas, and they were always clean, courteous and immaculately turned-out as they let me into their embassies.

Some US Marines, before they got all whiney

Many details of Marlantes’ narrative do not gel with my own knowledge of the war in Vietnam. For instance, Marlantes states that Marines would usually only put 18 rounds into their 20 round M16 magazines, to prevent jams caused by weak springs. I have read in several books that the true figure was 19.

In Full Metal Jacket, several of the Marines wore peace symbols and similar beatnik regalia on their helmets and flak jackets as ironic symbols to demonstrate their commitment to the war against communism. In Matterhorn, only one character does so. Bit perfunctory, Mr Marlantes. Smacks of box-ticking.

The novel’s Vietnamese characters are oddly unrounded: indeed, the Vietnamese themselves are almost entirely absent, appearing only as figures glimpsed in the jungle, or fleetingly in the heat of a fire-fight. None has been given any real dialogue, much less an opportunity to interact with the American protagonists in a literal or symbolic examination of the meaning of war, and of America’s undoubted if sometimes frustrated good intentions. Yet such exchanges were clearly a commonplace for US infantry personnel, and radio DJs, serving in ‘Nam.

My doubts hardened yet further when I flicked through the military glossary appended at the end of the novel. Marlantes defines the term “O.P.” as standing for “outpost”. Wrong, Karl. It stands for “observation post”. Always has done, always will.

His derivation for the term “poag” – it should be spelled “pogue” – meaning a soldier serving his country in a logistical capacity, is quite incorrect: I shall not repeat it here. As those of us who served with pride in the US Army quartermaster corps could have told him, “pogue” derives from the Gaelic word “póg”, or kiss, and refers to the great esteem in which rear-echelon support personnel are held by the rest of the military.

Elsewhere, he claims that the weight of a 155 mm howitzer shell, at 95 pounds, was nearly three times the weight of a 105 mm shell. This rang alarms bells with me. In fact, a standard Nato M1 105 mm high explosive shell weighs 18.1 kg, or just short of 40 pounds. Three would weigh 120 pounds. The figures just don’t add up.

It is with great sadness that I say this, but there is a history of people with poor military records, or no record at all, falsifying their life stories to claim combat experience in Vietnam. This kind of imposture is much more difficult in relation to my own war, Desert Storm: there were special tee-shirts on sale at all the PX stores, and if you didn’t buy one, then you weren’t there. Case closed.

How do we know that Marlantes is not himself a sad fantasist, guilty of a massive fraud on the American reading public? Apart from his Navy Cross, Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for Valor, two Purple Hearts and ten Air Medals, what trace did he leave of his alleged time in the bush along the DMZ? Nobody I ever met at dinner parties in Georgetown or Annapolis mentioned having served with him.

Remember John Kerry? We don’t get fooled again.

One last thought: when did the Marines get to be so goshdarned whiney?

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