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July 10, email to Senator John McCain, Republican

Dear Senator McCain,

A few moments ago I had a frank conversation with your press secretary, Rebecca Hank.  In it I told her that I knew about the disaster that befell the 3/7 Cavalry at the Baghdad Airport on the morning of Saturday, April 5.  My specialty as an Army officer was military intelligence (Soviet emphasis) and public affairs, and my conclusions about the tragedy have been absolute from the time it happened.  Everything I have learned since has been mere confirmation.

I cried when I saw it happen, because it was just that obvious.  I waited for the commander in chief to tell the public over the weekend, then realized that he wasn’t going to do it.  Next day I went and collected relief funds at my former college for forty hours (over two weeks) – and got twenty dollars for the widows and orphans from the public.  I cried over that, too, then got onto my touring bicycle and rode the thousand miles from Texas to Ft. Stewart, Georgia, hoping that my efforts would somehow atone for my country’s omissions.  When I reached the post (three weeks later), I contacted senior officials and received confirmation that my theory was correct.

Senator, you are a brother officer, and that means a lot to me.  I implore you to act with the honor that you showed when you stood up for me and every other soldier as a POW.  For God’s sake, stand up for us again!  Politicians calculate polls and positions, but I believe you are above that.  In my small way I have sacrificed and undertaken risk for our fallen brothers of the 3/7 Cavalry, and I believe that others would do so if they only knew the truth.

I wanted to puke when the commander in chief landed on the USS Abraham Lincoln and kept the cover-up going.  Memorial Day I wanted to puke again, because the commander in chief talked about remembering the dead with the dirt still under his fingernails from burying the unacknowledged bodies of the 3/7 Cavalry.  I will never forgive the man.  He is a liar and a coward.  I still want to puke when I read, hear and see in the embedded media that only thirty soldiers have died from hostilities, when I know that they’re not reporting the other deaths of hundreds who died before May 1, and are omitting the “non-hostile” deaths since May 1.

I am a Houston writer who has been publishing opinion in the local and national media markets for the last two decades.  When I was the Houston NBC affiliate’s editorial writer, I was interviewed by the Bush Team to be his speech writer and decided that they weren’t worth the trouble.  I am finishing a book about my experiences since the Baghdad Airport catastrophe:  “April Fools, Captain May.”  In it I state that I am the only objective media in an Orwellian cover up.  The book, already finished, will likely be a best seller, and I hope you will read it with interest, perhaps even respect.  I turn to you as a man of honor, on the advice of my best friend, a former Reagan/Bush insider, to make a difference NOW.  You will earn my undying gratitude if you will be a soldier and save the honor of all soldiers.

Respectfully, Captain May, MI

PS:  Aside to Ms. Hank:  Please forgive my rough ways and words, and please try to understand them in context:  I have been hung up on by most of the major media in America in the last three months, from the New York Times and Washington Post to the broadcast networks, not because I was wrong, but because the media does not give a shit about the men and women in uniform whom I have loved and led.  I believe you are accustomed to having a gruff soldier for a boss.  I apologize for sounding like a man who has had as much hypocrisy as he can bear.  It is becoming harder and harder to believe that anyone has honor any more, and I am embittered by it all.  If I’m right about the cover up, shouldn’t I be?

I was in earnest when I said that, should I be wrong in my inferences about the Battle of Baghdad and the body count, I would donate $1,000 to the senator’s next campaign (and I hope it’s for president) if he will call me and disabuse me of my delusion.  Did all my practice in reading through the government-directed lies of Pravda, Izvestia and Krasnaya Zvezda make me paranoid?  If so, it would be worth every penny of the pledge to be told so by someone I believe I can trust, and I’ll accept Senator McCain on his word if he says I’m flat wrong.  I do not say that for the Democratic leaders to whom I sent the pending essay in April, who have failed to take up the tragedy that made me write it.

Captain May

 

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