Yahoo! News

6 Court-Martialed for Scrounging Equipment

Granted Yahoo! isn't known for its hard-hitting news stories, it's our homepage in our break room at work and I always peruse the top headlines @ noon each day. I usually read at least one, usually two to three stories. This one caught my attention.

Let it be noted that I am all for freeing the people of Iraq AND for bringing our troops home as quickly as possible.

But why is it that when our forces need resources, we can't take what's available. This story says they stole the vehicles. They STOLE the vehicles - FROM OURSELVES!!! It's like my wife going in and using my socks (which she does) b/c mine are warmer than hers!!! These soldiers took a couple trucks in order to get their job done. By the sounds of it, the equipment was abandoned! No one ever reported the trucks as stolen or even missing! And whatever happened to "Get the Job Done By Any Means Necessary"?! What, we can go over there and shoot up the streets of Fallujah (remember, I support this war), but we can't use our own trucks to get fuel to other troops who need it?!?! It literally blows my mind...

The report also says that the troops should've returned the vehicles. "Yes, we put them back in the middle of the freakin' desert just to rot away and be an eyesore in the middle of nowhere."

I know very little about military etiquette, but the report says "The deal was, when you are moving, if it was going to take more than 30 minutes to fix it, you left it," as stated by an officer. Can the powers-that-be not see that it was going to take more than 30 minutes to fix these things, so they were left? What if rebel Iraqi forces would've gotten there first? Would we have tried to try them in the World Court on theft as a war crime? Or what if the equipment would've been the enemies and they left it? Could we have taken it then? Would these six have been punished the same way they are now?

You could also view this as too many levels of management and too much disconnect between the top and bottom levels. Just like in a huge corporation, the CEO doesn't realize how each plant functions, all the CEO sees is what is put on paper in front of him/her. All he/she sees are the hard numbers -- production, man hours, down time, widgets produced, widgets discarded. The CEO doesn't know that a widget can be made several different ways--some saving time, others not. So a CEO might go in there and say, "Why aren't you making more widgets?" Really, all one can say is, "We're doing the best that we can with what we're given."

What's really sad is these soldiers were just doing their jobs. However, 23 soldiers refused orders from a superior and nothing is going to happen to them: "Last week, the military said it would not court-martial any of 23 other Army reservists who refused a mission transporting fuel along a dangerous road in Iraq, complaining that their vehicles in poor condition and did not have armor."

For their "crimes" these men and women are getting six months in jail and dishonorable discharge. These are men and women who are protecting our freedoms, who did the best they could with the resources that they were given.

I'm sorry guys - you can't go around using America's equipment like it's yours. Because it's not.