Ghost Troop Home Page April Fools Part 4
Dear Webmaster X; I’ve just received your message:
“Please send documentation on why you started
and are continuing the progress of Ghost Troop 3/7 Cavalry. Then your other Ghost Troop e-mails will get
posted.”
Sounds reasonable to me, X. First, let me give
you my background, and work my way to Ghost Troop, 3/7 Cavalry. Please regard this as my apology: my explanation for my background, my ideas,
and my actions since accusing the president of the
My name is Eric Holmes May, born 1960. From 1977-1980, I served in the U.S. Chemical Corps in the 1st Cavalry Division, holding ranks from private to sergeant. In 1980, I entered the University of Houston Honors College, and while there, I received my commission as a second lieutenant (December 15, 1983). I completed my degree in Classics (Latin & Greek) in 1985.
After graduation, I
attended the Military Intelligence Officers Basic Course at
In 1990 I returned to
civilian life, teaching languages (Latin, Greek and Russian) for Houston’s Mt.
Carmel High School (where I was elected teacher of the year), and serving in
the Army Reserves as an expert on Opposing Forces (OPFOR) doctrine and tactics
with the 75th Division (Exercise).
In 1991, I began to write op-eds for the two
In 1993, I became the
public affairs officer for the 75th Division general staff, and
attended the
I continue to publish op-eds in the local and national media, mostly for clients, without my own name. I am what is known in the info biz as a ghostwriter.
Before the fall of Saddam
Hussein’s statue April 8, 2003, I had published two more strategic warnings,
specific to the new Gulf War. The first,
“Don’t
laugh at duct tape, it saves lives” (Houston Chronicle
Outlook, February 23, 2003) urged greater domestic caution in light of the
pending conflict, particularly at
“Military
intelligence officers are accustomed to being told that their field is a
contradiction in terms, and that they are the bearers of bad news and
worst-case scenarios. But it seems to me
that fortune is no longer smiling on our heroic liberation of
Nowadays when I search the
Internet, I find the word frequently used in mainstream media to describe
As my op-ed suggested, I was plenty skeptical about the American media’s presentation of the war. After all, I had been trained at the Defense Language Institute to evaluate the techniques and tendencies of the Soviet media, which some of my most intelligent Soviet-emigrant instructors assured me had duped them for decades on the realities of the world. I never forgot the important lesson that smart people could be misled by “the big lie” (as Hitler used to call it) of a false media picture.
My readings of the international press, my own observations, and a few choice conversations led me to believe that the American media had self-mobilized to support the war effort, much in the same way it self-mobilized to support the war effort in World War II; it had become something of a national propaganda agency, like the former Soviet TASS, or like Nazi Josef Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry. 911 was waved like a bloody shirt. Whatever did fit the picture (e.g., patriotism and profiteering) was hyped, while whatever didn’t fit the war picture (e.g., lack of WMD evidence and lack of terrorist connection evidence) was neatly omitted.
The propaganda crested as
You might now remember
that on the night before the Battle of Baghdad began, Saddam had promised us an
attack… Well, he kept his promise. Friday night at 8:30 p.m. (Central), I was
watching CNN showing the predawn of Saturday 5:30 morning around the world in
All at once the skyline
of the besieged city erupted with the flash and report of sustained
explosions. The CNN people (Arron Brown and Fredericka Whitfield) reacted with
surprise, saying that
In the next few minutes
CNN’s reporter Walter Rodgers, embedded with the 3/7 Cavalry, attempted to make
a report from the
Thankfully, Walter Rodgers’ luck held. A half hour later Fredericka and Aaron were off the clock and Larry King Live carried an interview between Rodgers and Lt. Col. Terry Ferrell – the commander of the very 3/7 Cavalry under fire at the airport. I had never seen the unit commander in two weeks of the TV war, so his sudden appearance was just more sad corroboration of my theory that we were getting the worst of it in the early Battle of Baghdad. Lt. Col. Ferrell bravely tried to keep a straight face as he told Rodgers that all was well at the airport, but ended up in tears; Rodgers too choked up to pick up the conversation. The put-up interview was yet more tragic corroboration of my sad analysis, and I began to cry along with Lt. Col. Ferrell and Rodgers, for the boys of the 3/7 Cavalry, remembering that I had once been a young cavalryman, too.
Over the weekend I picked up around twenty
“indicators” (to use the intelligence term) of a cover-up of the
To all but a few people, the CNN surprise about the explosions and the consequent events seemed little more than sloppy journalism, maybe frayed nerves, but I had the military and media background to see through the shadows and into the sun: We had come under attack from Iraqi forces. It wasn’t our explosions that had been blowing them up – it was the other way around!
Eight hours later, when it was morning back in the United States, most Americans thought nothing if they tuned into the news to find that the president had suddenly decided to go and visit Tony Blair in England; that last night’s build-up to the Battle of Baghdad had been supplanted by the contrived human interest story of Private Jessica; and that the Pentagon had cancelled it’s 1230 (Eastern Time) Saturday briefing, with no reasons given.
The tone of CNN, which I continued to watch, was secretive, and at times apologetic. Aaron Brown said that there were things that they couldn’t talk about now that they’d later explain… Reporter Christiane Amanpour chaffed at the conduct of the American misinformation campaign, and came close to condemning it on the air when she said that there were “substantial contradictions of fact” between allied and independent media accounts of events.
Media duly continued to broadcast Jessica for two days, then bombings meant to get Saddam for a third; they broadcast everything but the Battle of Baghdad. On Tuesday, April 8, public affairs contrived a pulling down of Saddam Hussein’s statue and word generally spread that the battle (never shown before and never acknowledged as begun) was over. Frustrated by the failure of the American media to cover the much-awaited battle, millions of Americans turned to the English-version Al-Jazeera online for their news – and it promptly crashed (probably interrupted on White House orders).
The public had (and continues to have)
no idea that the Iraqis did make
their promised counterattack on April 5, at the Baghdad Airport and later
across Baghdad, inflicting hundreds of casualties while fighting a rearguard
action as they dispersed into the underground.
On the basis of twenty years of military service, I infer that the
If I’m wrong, why didn’t
they report it? Wasn’t
At noon, April 8, 2003, I
began a solitary protest of the war and collection for the fallen of the 3/7
Cavalry at my alma mater, the University of Houston Honors College. In the next two weeks I sat and took
collections from the pampered elite of
The Honors students were
of service in one thing, though, despite their inhuman indifference to their
brothers (American and Iraqi) suffering in the war. Despairing of their humane assistance, I
appealed to their avarice, and with far better results. I posted a bounty offering $100 to any
The foreign students, ever more enterprising than the homegrown, made up the first posse for the truth of the Battle of Baghdad, saying that they would discover what had really happened from foreign sources. The next day they came back, jabbering to each other in a bewildering array of Asian languages, then told me with wonder what I already knew: that from Morocco to Malaysia, independent media were reporting that Americans had been fighting and dying in Baghdad all weekend.
My brother Baptists, the
Righteous Republican students, promised to claim the prize by researching the liberal American media, joking that such
a media as ours make the worst case
it could against the war, because it was pacifistic,
leftist and inimical in the ongoing Kulturkamf (a word they learned from right-wing megastar
Rush Limbaugh – along with all their ideas).
The next day they came back even more confused than the foreigners. They said apologetically that they
couldn’t find anything at all about the missing
On April 13, I wrote an op-ed “3/7 Cavalry, tragedy and travesty” for Frank Michel, the associate editor of the Houston Chronicle, who had been a colleague for more than ten years. He sealed it and put it in his desk, with witnesses watching, because he knew that I knew what I was writing about. He told his colleagues that the essay was history.
CNN’s Aaron Brown had an
on-air conversation with Walter Rodgers (evening, April 9), in which Brown
cryptically noted that CNN had been with the 3/7 Cavalry at the
Rodgers’ reply was as grim
as Brown’s question. He said that Lt. Col. Ferrell
had addressed the assembled squadron that afternoon, and had summed it up for
all the command when he said that “no one will ever feel safe again until they
get back home to
April 22, 2003: I began my annual
bicycle tour a bit early this year, and took it in the direction of Ft.
Stewart, Georgia, some 1,000 miles away from Texas. I wasn’t in a hurry, wanting to take the
pulse of our people. Along the way I
discussed my observations of April 5-8 with dozens of common people at the
diners, hotels, stores and post offices where I stopped to chat. I found that many of them remembered various
things about the information picture that didn’t quite fit right, but that none
of them could give an explanation for what, if anything, it all meant. Events were fresh on people’s minds, then,
and as I explained it all, they had an easy time seeing through the deception
of the times, but after we parted they left the topic, and the talk, behind
them and returned to their normal lives, content that even if there was a bit
of funny business going on in Iraq, everything was still fine in America.
I reached Ft. Stewart May
14 and went to the Marne Chapel, one of the 3rd Infantry Division
churches, and there met with a Colonel
Dennington, a Special Forces
chaplain. He acknowledged the Battle of
Baghdad and its dead, telling me that more soldiers than just the 3/7 Cavalry
had perished. He urged me to cover it up
for the greater good of the war effort, and said a few things that a reasonable
person might have thought menacing. I
still have Colonel Dennington’s receipt for the
paltry donation of the University of Houston Honors
College, which I carried to
It’s the first rule of a mission, after all, and every leader should know it: You always scout things out thoroughly before you act. If the president had kept this basic rule in mind, we wouldn’t be at war now.
After returning to Houston
(via bus) I kept low for the rest of May and most of June, as the Houston
Chronicle waited for the military to let the media tell the story of
Baghdad. According to my editorial
contacts Frank Michel and David Langworthy, the
military had ordered the media to suppress the
On June 25 General Clark came out against the Bush war on CNN Crossfire, and on June 27 I sent the Houston Chronicle’s opinion page editor, David Langworthy, my “Worried about the quicksand of war in Iraq” denouncing the Bush war plan and attacking the integrity of the commander-in-chief. Encouraged by the New York Times publication of Ambassador Joe Wilson’s op-ed against hyped WMD claims July 6, the Chronicle finally published my op-ed July 8.
Afterwards, I believed
that I had caused a fair amount of anger in the White House with my words and
deeds, because my editors carried no letters to the editor in response to
someone who had called George W. Bush a liar, avoided my calls, and stopped
publishing my op-eds – even going so far as to take
sudden vacations to be away when my essays arrived for editing. On the advice of friends and family I ducked
out of circulation for a while. Between
July 17 and September 21, I stayed inside my home. The timing of my move underground was
fortunate, perhaps, because other critics of the war (e.g., David Kelly of
I began to call this state of affairs, in which speaking the simple truth becomes dangerous, infowar, and it’s being waged against the American People. My media contacts (among them Thom Shanker of the New York Times, Barbara Phillips of the Wall Street Journal and Frank Michel of the Chronicle) have confirmed my pessimistic analysis: the infowar is real, reporters are frightened of the Bush people, and no one is talking or writing about (or allowing anyone else to talk or write about) the Battle of Baghdad – until public outcry makes some explanation unavoidable.
In other words, the media are afraid to tell us what a few of us have known from the start – they are not doing their jobs. Meanwhile, those who favor continuation of the war are smiling with the knowledge that with every passing month of public ignorance about the human cost of the war, we sink deeper-and-deeper into the Quicksand War. Ever loyal (to the war), the American media is now beginning to discuss the need for a draft. I’ve got a feeling that the brats of the Honors College of the University of Houston are about to find out a new word, conscription, and their interest in it will be far greater than merely academic.
So now we come to it…
Ghost Troop, 3/7 Cavalry is my name for a unit comprised of all the
unacknowledged dead soldiers from the Battle of Baghdad, who are receiving no
just reckoning or recognition because the media lied – and they continue to lie
– about the Battle of Baghdad. We
have a Watergate cover up on our hands; worse, we have a war. I have assumed command of Ghost Troop and,
according to the oath I swore when I accepted commission as an Army officer, I
have self-mobilized (under my former rank of captain) to oppose the Bush cover
up of the unpleasant realities of Iraq – especially of Ghost Troop, 3/7
Cavalry. I consider myself to be in a state of revolution against an unconstitutional, unconscionable abuse of the public’s right to know – the first
freedom guaranteed to Americans. So long
as there is no talk of what actually
happened in
Thanks for taking the time to check up on me, X. I hope this essay explains my background, my ideas and my actions. Drop me an email any time you want. I’m simply using my Constitutional right to free speech, but too many American military and media professionals are afraid to do the same. I’ll continue to speak and write my mind, and I’m willing to take my chances. Either the cover up-ends, or I do, it’s really as simple as that, isn’t it, X? Either way, I have a good book on my hands, about a sad, sad episode in American History.
Captain Eric May, MI,
PS: Thanks again for asking for coherent answers about
what I’m doing and why. The $100 offer
to find out the truth about the lost weekend in
Ghost Troop Home
Page April
Fools Part 4