Sgt. Dennis Weichel, 29, gave the world a measure of the bravery and humanity of our soldiers serving abroad this week. Weichel, a father of three from Rhode Island, gave his life to save an Afghan girl from being run over by a 16-ton armored fighting vehicle this week. While Afghan President Hamid Karzai has called all Americans “Demons” , Weichel did not hesitate to give his life for a little girl in danger.
Weichel, a Rhode Island National Guardsman, was riding in the convoy in Laghman Province in eastern Afghanistan when he and his comrades saw Afghan children collecting shell casings on the road. The soldiers got out of the convoy to shoo the children away for their safety. Then, one girl suddenly ran back to grab a casing that the children collect for money. Weichel looked up and saw a MRAP, or Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicle, heading toward the girl. He ran in front of the armored vehicle, grabbed the girl, threw her to safety, and was then run over himself.
A member of the Rhode Island National Guard since 2001, Weichel had only arrived in Afghanistan a few weeks ago. He previously served in Iraq.
I can only imagine the pain and sorrow of this family. However, if it is some small comfort, the entire nation is mourning the loss of this wonderful human being.
Source: ABC
Pretty powerful thread that cuts to a profoundly raw level.
Two threads really, and little way to reconcile which is more germane, those who honor the sacrifice, or those who note the rot in which it is, today and historically, encased?
I guess my question, without trying to ascribe moral superiority or depravity to anyone, might be: could the emotional honesty, or at least expression, have been achieved without the clash?
While one cannot but resonate to the act of human sacrifice in this isolated instance — appropriately so — so also has the increasingly depraved war machine not hesitated to use any tactic, up to and including air brushing, if not downright falsifying, it’s ugly footprint from Vietnam to the present.
What I don’t understand is why a guy with three kids is even in Afganistan. Why are any of our military personnel in Afganistan? What’s the real reason other than war profits? This is an unjust war and because of that it will never benefit the majority, only the minorities fighting over the spoils of war; a war of unauthorized political force.
This system on WP screws up at times. No other site does this dropping out whole segments. Could be SBK.
Otteray Scribe,
On the contrary, this is JUST the right time for this discussion, before this little propaganda playlet in spe by Obama’s psy-op corp has succeeded.
Before it has been digested and become a part of our biases, our knee-jerk responses when they blow the next bugle-call.
Forget for a moment the heroes of your family and your lineage.
Just come to the surface from your reverie, and look, register the crimes against humanity we commit under the guise of protecting us and the world by fighting these terrorists.
Every armed person is a terrorist. Shall we compare the numbers today to the those when we invaded. They are more today, aren’t they.
We are not standing at attention at graveside, OS. To honor the Sgt is all the more reason to ask if his and other’s sacrifices are reasonable—-and that of those we are “saving” from the Talibans. I thought it was Al Quada we were fighting.
I fear however it might be the graveside of american democracy if we do not act to end the MIC’s influence over our nation’s politics
Bron correctly said that the press uses this to support staying in the war, while the daily sacrifices of heros at home are ignored—-for the simple paraphrase Bron.
Similarly MM used his elequence in the service of after departure; and not at the rate so far paid.
The rep folks would have to be 50-50. Half Iranian, half Pakistanis.
We would only have to be protected if we, the demons tried.
The true demons are those who sit on corporate MIC boards JCS, DoD, etc. and steer us to eternal wars.
The only good thing I can see is the fact that the steerers still see the need of steering us with such headlines about heroes. Woe the day when they stop.
Just realize that every tug at your heart strings results in a melody they love to hear. And when it is played by millions it reminds of the dollars rolling into their coffers. It’s all a game, an illusion game.
Listen to MM’s prose, he’s obviously been there with his eyes open and can compare his time with this hero’s time, both at the front and here.
Thanks MM.
I hope Rafflaw (sorry I need a name, yours will do) stops his hero worship long enough to fully realize he has been duped, a patsy in the latest move in controlling the American people, when we are tiring and want to get out now, not later.
As for Panetta’s order: Would that have not been a scene almost in parallel to 2,600 years ago when Alexander’s troops forced him to halt and return home when they tired of war. Can’t you see it? P. and the brass bleeding on the podium. Truly a historical event. Which nation would we have attacked as a scapegoat for that? What new laws would increase their control of us? Any suggestions.
Historic. truly—-not mediaspeak meant.
Commoner:
In another of the points you raised, you stated that our impoverished and vastly outgunned adversaries — “freedom fighters,” in their own eyes — refuse to “fight fair” against the world’s most expensive and lavishly equipped military and profiteering mercenary adjunct forces. The British army and their Hessian mercenaries used to complain about that same “unfairness” when the colonial Americans refused to assemble in neat formations so that the British could easily mow them down in industrial-strength numbers. Technically, people engaged in real, life-or-death warfare inevitably resort to “asymmetrical” tactics: meaning that if you can cheaply and effectively kill the foreign invader with some AK-47s and left-over artillery shells cobbled together with a little improvisation, then you do that. This has proved a winning strategy for several impoverished countries that America has tried to overwhelm with vast, indiscriminate firepower over the past half century. Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. Same old same old. Those with next to nothing fight with what little they have. And if they have nowhere to go, they stay and fight until the invader limps off to lick his wounds and contemplate national bankruptcy. Why Americans refuse to learn this lesson — despite repeated instruction by victorious “dead-enders” (Rumsfeld) “in their last throes” (Cheney) has to say something about national learning impairment among American political, military, and media “elites.”
In short, the pajama-clad peasants and sandal-shod poppy farmers who keep whipping our fat asses with little or nothing continue to do so because (1) they have no other choice, and (2) “unfairness” works for them. If only they would just lay down and die!
We really ought to mind our own business and boot our own corrupt and incompetent “elites” out of their offices.
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.”
So:
With their tails tucked proudly ‘tween their legs,
Advancing towards the exit march the dregs
Of Empire, whose retreat this question begs:
“No promised omelet? Just the broken eggs?”
Surely some heroes in there somewhere and occasionally, but for the most part, just another long, drawn-out, pathetic attempt at “face saving” by the Fig Leaf Contingent and Buy Time Brigade. As T. S. Elliot wrote a long time ago in The Hollow Men:
“This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
I know bangs and whimpers when I hear them — and I know the difference. Honoring the dead instead of hanging those who got them killed pretty much covers the options that Americans seem content to accept. Momentarily consoling, perhaps; but obviously ineffective at preventing the unnecessary recurrence of yet more heroic death in service to vicious, venal vainglory.
@MIchael Murray
1. Do the doctors in Taiwan make a killing like the specialists here?
2.”In Vietnam, at this stage of the desultory withdrawal (in which I served eighteen months), we had many instances of mutiny, if not outright “fragging,” of ignorant, gung-ho officers by their bitter, demoralized troops. Not for no reason did current Secretary of War, Leon Panetta, require that troops (I mean, heroes) wishing to hear his address first unload their weapons. Someone up the food chain has gotten the message that the usual unraveling has begun in earnest — even among the “heroes.””
The troops are under a lot of pressure. He may just be wary of someone who is on the very edge and something he says will push them over. I do respect your opinion and you clearly do mark Sgt. Weichel as hero.
3. “Yes, many Americans wish desperately to believe that we have really killed all those people and made their miserable lives even more miserable for their own good and that therefore, our victims should feel nothing but gratitude and a passive desire to let us dictate their lives to them. I chalk up Professor Turley to this category of knee-jerk nationalists who will snatch at any straw of “good news” — in this case, the noble death of a hero — because, unfortunately, he has nothing much else but the endless body counts with which to estimate our “success” and “progress” after almost a decade of failure at nearly every level of policy.”
Um…the Prof clearly rejects the wars and the billions being spent on them. I highly doubt that he is knee-jerking anything. Also, just throwing this out there, the civilians seem not all that unhappy to have Americans there especially in Iraq where Saddam treated anyone he didn’t like sadistically. There was that story of a guy who lived in a wall for like a decade. Also, I would like to think that our incursions in the Middle East has triggered the Arab Spring, though I cannot tell whether that is good or bad.
As for the troops at checkpoints many of them have been killed by suicide bombers. As I stated before, the other team does not play fair. They use women, medical convoys etc to bomb our boys. I do not condone the shooting of innocent civilians, but if it is you and a potential bomb coming your way what would you do? If you shout warnings in Arabic and they still keep on coming, what should be done?
Commoner:
Thank you for the response, I’ll skip the Taiwanese doctors — good ones — for a later date. The currently devolving debacle in Afghanistan will more than do for the present.
I’ll try to do this in segments, since each point I want to make will require some elaboration. Taking your last point first, I can only say that before I deployed to Vietnam, I had eight months of intensive language study, along with eleven weeks of counter-insurgency training. We had our heads filled with all sorts of propaganda about little Vietnamese kids with bombs strapped to themselves by their mothers, just to kill us. Once in Vietnam, however, I only ran into hordes of street-urchin beggars offering to sell me a bag of peanuts while their cute little friends deftly sliced open my pants pockets looking for my wallet (which, fortunately, I kept inside my shirt). Mostly, the Vietnamese just wanted us to leave. Which we did. Everyone — them and us — started getting better right away.
In today’s “professional” military, our soldiers and marines deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan have hardly any foreign language training whatsoever, since they operate almost exclusively within their own American units for lack of trust and confidence in the local forces they ostensibly have come to “help.” Consequently, our troops for the most part speak only English — or what passes for that in the military — and haven’t the slightest understanding of which of many languages the local people speak. So after reading of General McChrystal’s up-front admission that “we’ve shot an amazing number of people who posed no threat to our forces,” I thought back on my own experiences in Vietnam and composed:
“Thanks for Nothing”
Benevolent invader of my land
How can I thank you for the helping hand?
Why, had you not come here with awe and shock,
Reducing my poor home to piles of rock,
I might have raised my children safe and sound,
But, thanks to you, I’ve laid them in the ground.
A wife I had, once too, but now no more.
She died one day while driving to the store.
Some nervous mercenaries that you hired
Screamed something at her once, then aimed and fired.
The bullet-riddled windshield told the tale:
That “freed” of life, our women need no veil.
Your generals have come so many times,
Yet never have to answer for their crimes.
Instead, promotion weighs them down with stars
But never, like enlisted men, the scars
Resulting from the bungling and sheer waste
Of thinking last but shooting first in haste.
On nine-eleven, two-thousand-and-one
You got a taste of what you’ve often done
To countries that had never caused you harm
Yet still, too late, you sounded the alarm
And whipped yourself into a lather thick
So you could hurt yourself with your own stick.
Three thousand on that fateful day you lost.
Five thousand more you’ve added to the cost
Since then, which only proves that there or here
You act the same: in folly, rage, and fear.
In time, you’ll go back home to where you’re from,
To fight among yourselves, the deaf and dumb.
Too bad for all the carnage that you’ve caused
Who never thought or for a minute paused
Before afflicting us with your disease:
A plague of bankrupt bullies, fascist fleas,
Who, both hands outward stretched to beg a loan,
Continue “helping” us to shrink and groan.
You talk to pat yourselves upon the back.
Your actions only scream of what you lack:
The insight and intelligence to see
How much you’ve harmed yourself as well as me.
But just the same I’ll thank you to go home
Before you earn the fate that toppled Rome.
Michael Murry, The Misfortune Teller, Copyright 2009
Next up: Why won’t the unarmed “fight fair”?
Agree raff. I understand Micheal’s bitterness and anger, but there is a time and place for everything. This ain’t it.
Amen to what pete and Gene said. Sgt. Weichel is a hero of the first order.
Elaine,
It’s about what I expect out of someone of Bron’s character (or lack thereof). He’s already demonstrated how little he valued the life of both the Sergeant, the little girl he saved or the recognize the humanity of the Sergeant’s actions or value his memory in the eyes of his family. That he doesn’t value the lives of anyone other than himself is simply par for the Objectivist course and a perfect illustration of why he and his chosen operational principles are ethically bankrupt and generally reprehensible. Mean and the simple rationalization of being mean because it allegedly gets you what you want is what Objectivism is all about once you dispense with the solipsistic window dressing and literary pretension. It’s the pseudo-philosophy of choice for sociopaths and the emotionally stunted for that very reason.
And what pete said.
talk about someone making a petty point
Lottakatz:
As much as I admire and enjoy the Sweeny Todd avatar, I insist on keeping things in perspective — even personal heroism. I do not doubt the authenticity of this particular story — even given the contrived propaganda tales of Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman — nor do I wish to cast aspersions upon the memory of the too-soon departed. Nonetheless, Professor Turley attempted to use this individual case in a way that I found objectionable: namely, to get in a dig at our Afghan puppet, Hamid Karzai. We have placed this hapless man in an impossible situation. We do whatever we want in his country, irrespective of anything he may say about it, and then we complain.if he identifies, for even an instant, with what his countrymen actually feel about our invasion and occupation of their country. Had Professor Turley merely recounted an uplifting example without trying to make personal political hay out of it, I would not have felt it necessary to comment as I have.
I guess I just can’t stomach the “hiding behind the troops” or “waving the bloody shirt” crap that I keep hearing from so many of my fellow citizens — especially the legions of them who never served in one of these clueless crusades. When we get to the point of insisting that “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” then all sanity has fled. I said way back at the start of this disaster — in the company of millions of others — that nothing but needless death and disaster would come of it. But the Stud Hamster from Texas had a “gut” and a voice from “a higher father” that told him to light the world on fire. And most of my countrymen went along without a whimper. As New York Times pundit Thomas Friedman blithely put it: “We had to hit somebody. … because we could.” It didn’t matter whom. And there you have the truth of it.
Too bad for all the dead people. Too bad for the sergeant and his family. But what did anyone with an ounce of worthwhile life experience expect? You can’t do a wrong thing the right way. I suspect that more heroes will die in Afghanistan, most of them barely armed Afghans resisting an enormous foreign military occupation. Who reports on their courage and self-sacrifice? Any reporter who even tries that will find themselves imprisoned, if not drone-murdered, as a “terrorist facilitator.”
Again, Professor Turley attempted to use an unfortunate death to make a petty point. I called him on it. I think I’ve explained why.
You know bron, you remind of those folks that were FORCED To fight another WAR that was not of their choosing….. Do you recall a thing called Vietnam where returning soldiers were rejected by people like you and I have even heard that they were spit upon….. I think you’re spitting on these GIs……
Bron,
That was a truly nasty thing to say to Gene.
Gene H:
With you as a father they will probably end up in prison or on drugs, I suggest you dont reproduce for the sake of the unborn.
“Sgt. Dennis Weichel, 29, gave the world a measure of the bravery and humanity of our soldiers serving abroad this week.”
Correction: Sgt. Dennis Weichel, gave the world a measure of the bravery and humanity of one of our soldiers [occupying a foreign country] this week. Taking nothing away from his personal example, but what one can surmise about the attitudes and behavior of the rest of our imperial legionary forces remains a difficult, if not impossible, endeavor.
In Vietnam, at this stage of the desultory withdrawal (in which I served eighteen months), we had many instances of mutiny, if not outright “fragging,” of ignorant, gung-ho officers by their bitter, demoralized troops. Not for no reason did current Secretary of War, Leon Panetta, require that troops (I mean, heroes) wishing to hear his address first unload their weapons. Someone up the food chain has gotten the message that the usual unraveling has begun in earnest — even among the “heroes.”
Yes, many Americans wish desperately to believe that we have really killed all those people and made their miserable lives even more miserable for their own good and that therefore, our victims should feel nothing but gratitude and a passive desire to let us dictate their lives to them. I chalk up Professor Turley to this category of knee-jerk nationalists who will snatch at any straw of “good news” — in this case, the noble death of a hero — because, unfortunately, he has nothing much else but the endless body counts with which to estimate our “success” and “progress” after almost a decade of failure at nearly every level of policy.
As we used to say in Uncle Sam’s Canoe Club (a.k.a., the United States Navy): “One ‘aw-shit’ wipes out ten ‘atta-boys.'” And here we have only one ‘atta-boy.’ Even nine more won’t make up for the next ‘aw-shit’ when another paranoid truck driver or mercenary SUV privateer wipes out another carload full of Afghans on his speeding way from nowhere to nowhere else with nothing in between worth doing.
Way past time for the demons to leave Afghanistan. Like, yesterday. Nowhere near enough heroes to make any difference.
Lottakatz:
his act was definitely a manifestation of his humanity.
Bron,
I’m not responsible for the priorities of the local and/or national media.
I am, however, responsible for my own choices such as the choice to recognize heroism when and where I see it and to have empathy and compassion for my fellow beings.
Just like you’re responsible for your choice to be an Objectivist – worshiping your own ego and thinking selfishness is a virtue – and the ridiculous statements that your operational principles cause to spew from your mouth such as the one above where you minimized a heroic action, the value of a little girl’s life and the memory of Sgt. Dennis Weichel.
When I’ve got children?
I’m going to teach them to be exactly not like you.
That’s what I understand.
AY:
Maybe so.
Bron, Michael, Id707, you can respect, even admire Sgt. Weichel’s selfless impulse without it condoning the evil you write about; without it diminishing the heroism of Mr. Heck or the dozens, perhaps hundreds of selfless actors that act daily. I weep for them all when I read about them, it doesn’t alter my horror or hatred- hatred- of the Abu Ghraib torturers or long-distance killers in safe bunkers killing children with drones, reducing lives and deaths to no more than a video game. It strengthens it if anything but that’s for a different thread, a more appropriate compartment.
C’mon guys, credit and compassion where it’s due. Can we not find some shared humanity in one little detail of the larger, horrific picture without all of the tainted baggage? For just a minute or two?
Lottakatz: “Can we not find some shared humanity in one little detail of the larger, horrific picture without all of the tainted baggage? For just a minute or two?”
Again, I would concur except that Professor Turley could not resist attempting to exploit our normal emotional sympathies in order to score a point in his vendetta against Hamid Karzai, who called some of our vaunted Visigoths “demons” for the many demonic things they have done in Afghanistan over the past decade. Professor Turley found President Karzai’s language offensive. President Karzai found America’s blundering belligerency offensive. I find Professor Turley’s own use of “tainted baggage” inappropriate in this context and reserve the right to say so.
If anything, as I’ve pointed out above, not only did Sergeant Weichel save a little Afghan girl from getting run over, but he also saved one of his fellow soldiers from giving Hamid Karzai yet another horrendous example of American demons at work running down Afghan citizens on a regular basis. What Professor Turley would have had to say about Karzai’s choice of language in that circumstance, I will not venture to guess. Personally, I find Professor Turley’s hyper-sensitivity to aggrieved language — especially when understandable — both self-serving and unpersuasive.
So, good for the double-hero. He saved not only one little Afghan life, but probably a few others, American and Afghan, who would have had to pay the price for the inevitable revenge exacted upon anyone associated with the ongoing deaths of innocent Afghan family members by the American military, NATO military, privateer mercenaries, and crony-corporate camp followers.
As for the “minute or two” of patient forbearance in respect for the needlessly dead, I ran out of that a long time ago. And just the other day, when I thought that perhaps a shred of learning might have taken place somewhere in the American government, I read where President Obama has begun hawking a new book on “foreign policy” by one of America’s stupidest neo-con chickenhawks, Fred Kagan; he of the infamous American Enterprise Institute, wrong about practically everything. Look for more sergeants dying needlessly and pointlessly real soon now. Patience, my aching ass.