Warrior Poet Leaving Iraq

Captain Danjel Bout was cited previously here as "a warrior who can write too." (L.A./Iraq Fundamentals.) Now, after 18 months in Iraq with his Nightstalkers, tour almost completed, he's going home to California. In his blog he posts about it, Last Days at the FOB. Yet despite the going-home motif,  it may not give aid and   comfort to  Congressman Murtha, Barbara Streisand, Mother Sheehan Media, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi or other leading proponents of Get, i.e. Get Bush and Get Out of Iraq.  Captain Bout writes, in part,

 

                           ....Do not mistake my words. I am  not broken, nor am I damaged. The story of our mission is not a tragedy, despite our losses. The deepest etchings on my soul, the ones that will remain in both this life and the next, were the incandescent examples of valor, courage, and brotherhood I witnessed each and every day. The men who served at my side were bound to me, and I to them, with tidal forces that have no equivalent in the sterile formality of the living world. Back home the concept of "self" is a rigid construct, a domain mapped with the formality of a land agreement. But here on the bleeding edge we became  something greater than our individual parts. We became a family.

 

Comments

[Trevor]

I am going to miss his voice. I really enjoyed reading his thoughts and seeing into his tiny little piece of this war.

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

No question. If I had been in-country, Thunder 6 (Captain Danjel Bout) would have been on my must-meet list.

[scott edwards]

"Warrior Poet Leaving Iraq" leaving his metaphors behind... see what they have been up to:

http://iraq-kill-maim.org/

While Bout waxes on about the ties that bind between his unit, hovering halfway between agape and eros, Gringoman sees this as an impediment to criticism of an illegal and immoral war. (i.e.Soldier writes prose ergo gangster president must be correct)

Moreover is Bouts' charecterization of being on the "bleeding edge"; "a family"... and Gringoman gushes over this prose taken straight out of Mario Puzo!
Gringoman, Consigliari to the man in uniform. You never provided any 'aid and comfort' in your lit classes because you were supposed to read the assigned books.

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

Comrade Eduardos,

Due to the vagaries of history and the goddess Fortuna, your defamation of a noble soldier in the war against medeival barbarism won't get you the Stalin Peace Prize. But cheer up. There's hope for these "progressive" platitudes about the Americans and their "illegal" and "immoral" attack on tyranny and fanatical Allah- hustlers. Have you contacted Al-Jazeera? You know about the OBL trophy awarded to Useful Infidels? For business types, there may also be franchises for Osama tee-shirts, a popular item, we hear, at student "anti-imperialist" demos chanting "Bush Lied!" By the way, did you learn about "Consigliari" by reading Mario Puzo? I thought the angry izquierdistas and cafe rebels got it from Che Guevara and Fidel Castro.

[scott edwards]

Poor Gringoman. So unable to distinguish metaphor from reality...DEFAMATION?!
Look at Bouts words! About the men in his proximity! His metaphor:"...bound to me and I to them with tidal forces that have no equivalant in the sterile formality of the living world. Back home 'self' is a rigid construct, a domain mapped with the formality of a land agreement.." One might only conjecture what tidal forces are unleashed outside the conveyance of seisen. In other words this is the 'literature' of the 'self-absorbed' contemplating each step as momentous in history. He probably means the bond of "family" between the ranks is not exactly what he states here. Thus should keep his day job... scratch that, give up both jobs!
For you Gringoman, who uses catch labels as a substitute for subtantitive reasoning, I will suggest here that war hero Bout has cribbed metaphor from bestsellers; and in this case, Puzo.

Most american Republicans are unread and you Gringoman are no exception: See "Canto 26 Consiglieiri Fraudolenti", Dante Alighieri. Itself a metaphor, it describes the beauty of Beatrice (not of interest to you or Bout apparently) and the Hell inflicted by mankind.
I can assure you that his raison d'etre is no metaphor; rather he employs metaphor to rationilize what he was trained to do and what he does:

http://iraq-kill-maim.org/

Apropos metaphors, most americans are easily swayed by symbols.. like Stalinist, Communist, Osama.. n'est pas, gringoman? Too lazy to get into the substance.

[Bingo]

The iraq-kill link is really something beyond the pale. Thanks for the link.

No offense, but you guys seem as bitchy as cats with turpintine asses.

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

Comrade Eduardos, as a member of LeftyWorld, Ltd. your technique of Smear For The Cause is getting, well, do you really want to be so obvious about it?. I'm not sure that even Father Karl would approve, despite how you try to invert reality on its head. For example,take your political hack's need for the Americans in Iraq to be "immoral" and "illegal". So you can't resist trying to depict a brave soldier, Captain Bout, a man of action, as being a navel gazer. It's as if you need him to be more like a progressive couch potato,a chicken dove, except with "imperialist" character defects, including plagiarizing (or did you mean semi-plagiarizing?) from Mario Puzo. How sad. How typical. Is this what the Class War, vino rojo and Fidelismo in Chile has come to? Captain Bout lives his soldier's life, refuses the Left's attempt to guilt-trip him, and also, while deep in a dangerous Sunni zone of Saddamite terrorists and hold-outs, also even looks beneath the kevlar-and-date-palm surface, under the "desert moon" too. But you manage to find what you consider to be a poorly managed metaphor in his hastily written posts while at war, and like the "people's literary critics" once famous in Soviet Russia, you hammer (and sickle) on that, while conveniently ignoring the many other descriptions and his many posts. Of course, you could find his tribute to "a natural-born warrior", Cpl. Marcelino Ronald Corniel of La Puente, California, as not meeting your anti-colonialist standards, and too sentimental. And his post about the patrol's encounter with the mother who pushed her little boy at them, with the congenital birth defect, "who looked as frail as spun glass," as his "atrophied limbs seemed to hang off his body like limp banners." Too much simile for you? Metaphorically inadequate? Confusing real-life experience with history---especially the history a good Lefty can get on a good couch? Or their encounter with the family whose young daughter suddenly had her head crushed by a bullet that came raining through the ceiling---a bullet fired in the air possibly a kilometer away by Iraqis celebrating a victory over Syria in football. Or is this what the couch-borne comrades mean by "the literature of the self-absorbed contemplating each step as momentous in history"? (To quote a "progressive" authority on Mario Puzo.) This manner of living real life while at the same time examining it can be excused in a sea-going Joseph Conrad, sailing the coasts of Asia or Africa, and writing of it years later, but for Captain Danjel Bout, active duty Commander of A Company, 1-184 IND, 3ID in Southern Baghdad, well.........And since he is clearly not one of Mother Sheehan's boys, and probably not a "progressive" vet running for Congress with Soros 527 money, how can he write that he "felt my veins run with chill blood and my face streak with hot tears"?

Comrade Eduardos, chug some more of that Chilean red. Maybe it will help you take stock of who is a "Republican," who is a Mario Puzo acolyte and who is "well read."

ps. When making a pretentious claim about Canto XXVI in Dante's Inferno, you should first ascertain that it's mainly about Ulysses and his adventures. That could save you from making an ignorant assertion about Beatrice. That's step one when you want to present yourself as "well read."

[Dan Cameron Rodill]

Hey Bingo:

"Bitchy as cats with turpentine asses?" Okay, that's half-right." But what in the hail do you mean by "the iraq-kill link is beyond the pail?"

[Phillip Wedeen]

Gringoman on drugs! Please show us how Ulysses is the subject of Dante's Inferno? Gringoman should confine his remarks to areas within his field...

The cant by edwards was about Gringoman creating the new Mark Twain out of Bouts prose; "A Warrior Who Can Write". Any critical interpretation of the Bout metaphors, posited here by Gringoman, would easily refute that interpretation. The criticism was of Gringoman, not Bout.
Bout can relax.
Either the american people will see to it that this cirminal enterprise be frog-marched out of the White House, or the Hague will mete out justice to america's Pinochet on steroids. Edwards work at the Hague is drawing a line for indictments to those at the rank of colonel or above; unless of course those lesser ranks have killed or tortured innocent civilians.