...said the mother of a soldier on Iraq. Halliburton swims in its billion-dollar slush fund of taxpayer handouts and US soldiers are still relying on mom and dad to send over GPS, body armor, Humvee armor, secure radios, etc. Hell, I even recall Rummy wearing some special fancy boots on his last visit over to Iraq but guys in the field from the National Guard in particular, get whatever is left over from years gone by.
This president has the nerve to attack John Kerry when our troops - HIS TROOPS - still don't have the equipment they need, and apparently aren't getting it for a while. WTF? How can any service member or their family in good conscience vote to re-elect the man who sent our troops to battle with insufficient equipment, and who to this day is still failing them? Republicans are better friends of the military, my ass. Let's not forget that it was Dick Cheney and George Bush 41 who reduced the military from 2.2 million servicemembers to to 1.6 million (per DOD's own Web site) over their four years in office. Why do the Bushes and the Cheneys hate our military?
Here's the rest of the Beverly Hillbillies horror story from the NYT:
...many of the company's trucks still have no armor, soldiers and relatives said, despite running some of the most dangerous missions in Iraq and incurring the highest rate of injuries and deaths among the Illinois units deployed there....Then there's this little gem:
Though soldiers of all types have complained about equipment in Iraq, part-timers in the National Guard and Reserve say that they have a particular disadvantage because they start off with outdated or insufficient gear. They have been deployed with faulty radios, unreliable trucks and, most alarmingly for many, a shortage of soundly armored vehicles in a land regularly convulsed by roadside attacks, according to soldiers, relatives and outside military experts....
Before the 103rd Armor Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard left in late February, some relatives bought those soldiers new body armor to supplant the Vietnam-era flak jackets that had been issued. The mother of Sgt. Sherwood Baker, a member of the regiment who was killed in April, bought a global positioning device after being told that the Army said his truck should have one but would not supply it.
And before Karma Kumlin's husband left with his Minnesota National Guard unit in February, the soldiers spent about $200 each on radios that they say have turned out to be more reliable - although less secure - than the Army's. Only recently, Ms. Kumlin said, has her husband gotten a metal shield for the gunner's turret he regularly mans, after months of asking.
"This just points to an extreme lack of planning ," said Ms. Kumlin, who is 31 and a student. "My husband is part of the second wave that went to Iraq."....
According to figures compiled by the House Armed Services Committee and previously reported in The Seattle Times, there are plans to produce armor kits for at least 2,806 medium-weight trucks, but as of Sept. 17, only 385 of the kits had been produced and sent to Iraq. Armor kits were also planned for at least 1,600 heavyweight trucks, but as of mid-September just 446 of these kits were in Iraq.
The Army says it is on schedule to armor all its Humvees in Iraq by April 2005, despite the fact that only one factory in the United States puts armor on the vehicles.April 2005? We've had Humvees in Iraq that haven't had sufficient armor for 18 months now, and they'll finally get the armor 2 years after the invasion? And that's a good thing?
