Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1

July 9, email to David Langworthy

You published the duct tape piece in March as an oddity from an eccentric: Four months later the paper is reporting that we Houston is a particularly vulnerable area for terror attack.

Pasadena. Houston seven out of seven. I met a barge operator…

Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is a bastard. Bush and folks like you thought that a war in the Middle East would be a gate to a better world. All it’s going to turn out to be is Watergate, and in your small way you have helped to commit it.

The standards of informational integrity for our war in Iraq were worthy of the National Enquirer. The standards of integrity in my local paper were no better, as your conversation about body count makes clear.

Please take me seriously David. Hell, if a big enough explosion happened, it would kill the colored and crackers (like yours truly) who live and work out there. For God’s sake, it might even shatter windows at the River Oaks Country Club. Please take me seriously to avert the latter calamity if not the former.

In 1991 you ran my essay

You remind me of the president, come to think of it, and the Secretary of War, and the vice president

You’ve said you can be objective about my writing. I’m glad to hear it. I’m going to take you at your word with this letter.

On March 31 I called you and told you that I had been talking with an old acquaintance of mine, another captain – but this one had served with the German Army Panzers on the Russian Front. We began to discuss operational details of the pending operations, along with geopolitical concepts, principles of maneuver and suppression, logistics, climate and terrain… In other words we spoke as professionals whom it would serve civilians to consider before going into war.

The next day, April Fools Day, I did what I had been trained at great taxpayer expense to do for generals: I analyzed the then-surging offensive pending war and said it was quicksand. I predicted a war of national liberation and a withering summer.

You ran the piece as an oddity, and laughingly told me that on April 2 it had to be used now or never, since it would be irrelevant by the weekend.

You blew me off when I told you I had come back from Ft. Stewart Georgia with official confirmation that the 3-7 Cavalry had indeed suffered massive losses in the Battle of Baghdad.

Before Bush went to the Mideast I told you I wanted to write an essay saying we were in a civil war

I think maybe it’s time for you to eat some of your words, because, in your own way, you and journalists like you have put us into a quicksand war. That’s why you’re covering up the body count.

Rich man’s war, poor man’s fight. Keep apologizing for the Righteous Reich, David. It won’t be your kin who get zapped in the sand, nope, they’ll be in (Lang)worthy estates here or up in Michigan where it’s cool – and close to Canada. Nope, looks like another case where you apparatchiks of the elite will continue to live well, as long as it’s only the poor who are dying.

All the best – Eric

Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 1