December 02, 2005
RE: "Living Hand to Mouth"
Dear Congressman Murtha,
I would like to comment upon the horrors inflicted upon our Marines in the field in Iraq. It is just as you said, our military is truly living hand to mouth.
According to one of my readers who has just received email from a cousin in Iraq, just last week at Thanksgiving at Camp Corregidor in Al Anbar province outside of Ramadi, our soldiers were barely getting by with steaks, crab legs, lobster, turkey, pie and ice cream. Horror of all horrors (and this is a direct quote), it was "all frozen stuff that loses something in translation."
Truly, these are deplorable conditions. He literally did have to eat those crab legs "hand to mouth."
Also, soldiers have griped about the low stopping power of some of our weapons, which seem to be stymied by even the simplest concrete block construction, and we're reverting n part to early Vietnam-era and earlier firearms for some missions. Got any idea who on the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee could have screwed that up?
Thanks.
I read a post to Stars & Strips that said the people at Camp Corregidor didn't have enough food to eat.
Here is a link
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?article=31168§ion=125&archive=true
The relevant part being:
"I know how to support the troops and be against the war. Here is how you do it: You buy hundreds and hundreds of dollars’ worth of food and spend hundreds of dollars to ship it to the 2-69 at Camp Corregidor in Ramadi, where there are soldiers who don’t have enough food to eat."
So I emailed my cousin at Camp Corregidor and here is part of his response I received on 9/10/05.
"In regards to having enough food, we have plenty here. I don't know about
some people and their tastes, but I'll bet that there are finiky(?) eaters
that want to have their favorite stuff mailed over. We have quite a variety
of food actually. I can't complain.
The living conditions are a bit rough, however. Burning shit, crowded
rooms, very limited access to PX, etc. I guess war is hell; at least it
beats freezing to death in Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge! The
action we see here is probably more concentrated than anywhere else in Iraq,
but it's not constant, high casualty-producing stuff."
It would have been nice to live hand to mouth this way in the first Gulf War... even for just Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Posted by: Old Soldier at December 2, 2005 12:18 PMI have info from one of the upper ranks here that Ramadi is a rough area.They were there for a brief period.I can't say we have too much to complain about here.We get three hots and a cot.Anyone who thinks this is a hard area needs a HUGE reality check.We take incoming MAYBE once a week,maybe.It's usually a rocket that doesen't hit much.You guys in Ramadi keep your eyes and ears open and your butts down.I was in the Corps and got out two months before my unit left to support OIF in Jan 2003.I hope all of my brothers and sisters at arms make it back to be with their families.Semper Fi.
Posted by: Vtmtnman at December 2, 2005 01:59 PMSomehow I can't help but feel that sarcasm is lost on the congressman.
Posted by: greg at December 2, 2005 02:49 PMMy husband is at Camp Corregidor, and in the beginning, the food situation was terrible. Our guys in the 3/103rd did not have enough to eat. I called the congressman from the area that my husband's unit is located, and he point blank told me that it wasn't his problem...that I should call the congressman from my own area. I asked him what difference that made...our soldiers were hungry. He hung up on me. I was floored. Needless to say, the food situation has improved greatly, the problem in the beginning was mainly due to the cook's unit having just transferred in, and they were using up what was left from the last unit waiting on their supplies to come in.
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