Dann Todd's 'Dain Bramage'^**

A Golfing Joke

WARNING - Profanity looms ahead.

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A nun walks into Mother Superior's office and plunks down into a chair.

She lets out a sigh heavy with frustration.

What troubles you, Sister?" asks the Mother Superior. "I thought this was the day you spent with your family."

It was," sighed the Sister. "And I went to play golf with my brother. We try to play golf as often as we can. You know I was quite a talented golfer before I devoted my life to Christ."

I seem to recall that," the Mother Superior agreed. "So I take it your day of recreation was not relaxing?"

"Far from it," snorted the Sister. "In fact, I even took the Lord's name in vain today!"

Goodness, Sister!" gasped the Mother Superior, astonished .."You must tell me all about it!"

Well, we were on the fifth tee...and this hole is a monster, Mother. 540 yard Par 5, with a nasty dogleg left and a hidden green and I hit the drive of my life. I creamed it. The sweetest swing I ever made. And it's flying straight and true, right along the line I wanted...and it hits a bird in mid-flight not 100 yards off the tee!"

"Oh my!" commiserated the Mother. "How unfortunate! But surely that didn't make you blaspheme, Sister!"

No, that wasn't it," admitted Sister. "While I was still trying to fathom what had happened, this squirrel runs out of the woods, grabs my ball and runs off down the fairway!"

"Oh, that would have made me blaspheme!" sympathized Mother.

"But I didn't, Mother Superior!" sobbed the Sister. "And I was so proud of myself! And while I was pondering whether this was a sign from God, this hawk swoops out of the sky and grabs the squirrel and flies off, with my ball still clutched in his paws!"

"So that's when you cursed," said the Mother with a knowing smile. "Nope, that wasn't it either," cried the Sister, anguished, "because as the hawk started to fly out of sight, the squirrel started struggling, and the hawk dropped him right there on the green, and the ball popped out of his paws and rolled to about 18 inches from the cup!"

Mother Superior sat back in her chair, folded her arms across her chest, fixed the Sister with a baleful stare and said...

"You missed the fucking putt, didn't you?"

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I love that joke. ROFL!!

by Dann 

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Michael Totten In Iraq

My other favorite journalist on Middle Eastern issues has arrived in Iraq. Michael Totten spent a considerable amount of time living in Beirut and reporting on the political and social changes that have been taking place in that country. He also spent a considerable amount of time reporting during and after last year's war between Israel and Islamic terrorists operating in southern Lebanon.

Now Michael is in Iraq....again. He has taken several trips into the Kurdish region and reported on the peace and progress that is going on in that part of Iraq. In fact, one trip was an unscheduled and spur of the moment side trip while he and a friend were traveling in Turkey.

Now he is embedded with the coalition forces operating as part of the recent "surge". From his recent post:

“We were on base at Camp Taji [north of the city] and commuting to work,” Major Jazdyk told me earlier. “The problem with that was that the only space we dominated was inside our Humvees. So we moved into the neighborhoods and live there now with the locals. We know them and they know us.”

Lieutenant Lawrence Pitts from Fayetteville, North Carolina, elaborated. “We patrol the streets of this neighborhood 24/7,” he said. “We knock on doors, ask people what they need help with. We really do what we can to help them out. We let them know that we’re here to work with them to make their city safe in the hopes that they’ll give us the intel we need on the bad guys. And it worked.”

.......

Everyone was friendly. No one shot at us or even looked at us funny. Infrastructure problems, not security, were the biggest concerns at the moment. I felt like I was in Iraqi Kurdistan – where the war is already over – not in Baghdad.

It was an edgy “Kurdistan,” though. Every now and then someone drove down the street in a vehicle. If any military-aged males (MAMs as the Army guys call them) were in the car, the soldiers stopped it and made everybody get out. The vehicle and the men were then searched.

Everyone who was searched took it in stride. Some of the Iraqi men smirked slightly, as if the whole thing were a minor joke and a non-threatening routine annoyance that they had been through before. The procedure looked and felt more like airport security in the United States than, say, the more severe Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza.

.......

“Why are you stopping these guys,” I said to Lieutenant Wolf, “when there are so many other people milling around on the streets?”

“Because they’re MAMs who are driving,” he said. “We’re going easy on everyone else. We’ve already oppressed these people enough. They have a night culture in the summer, so if they aren’t military aged males driving cars we leave them alone. We were very heavy-handed in 2003. Now we’re trying to move forward together. At least 90 percent of them are normal fun-loving people.”

“Do they ever get pissed off when you search them?” I said.

“Not very often,” he said. “They understand we’re trying to protect them.”

Michael also relates how a bunch of soldiers stop by one residence because someone inside had locked and loaded on them the night before. The phrase "locked and loaded" means that they were holding a rifle, probably and AK-47, it had a full magazine in place and the individual holding the rifle had pulled back on the charging handle thus putting a round in the chamber.

Not a smart thing to do when our armed forces are on patrol.

Their visit is serious because they have to identify threats to themselves and to the Iraqis living in the neighborhood. But they make it a "low key" visit. As one of the soldiers puts it, "we aren't going to be dicks". It turns out that the gentleman of the house had thought that terrorists or thugs had been nearby rather than the US Army. The episode closes with:

The old man hugged the lieutenant and kissed him on his both cheeks.

The family waved us goodbye.

“Ma Salema,” I said and felt slightly guilty for being there.

We walked back to the Humvees.

“Do you believe him?” I said to the lieutenant. I have no idea how to tell when an Iraqi is lying.

“I do,” he said. “I think he’s a good guy. His story matched what happened.”

“He didn’t want to answer your question, though,” I said, “about who he is afraid of.”

There are terrible stories around here about the masked men of the death squads. Sometimes they break into people’s houses and asking the children who they’re afraid of. If they name the enemies of the death squad, they are spared. If they name the death squad itself, they and their families are killed. It’s a wicked interrogation because it cannot be beaten – the children don’t know which death squad has broken into the house.

“He didn’t want to say who he’s afraid of because he’s afraid,” Lieutenant Wolf said. “If the insurgents find out he gave information to us, or that he helped us, he’s dead.”

Just another slice of Iraq that you won't find in your local paper or on the evening news. Plus Michael has tons of photos!!

by Dann 

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Modest Correction

I posted something a couple weeks ago from Michael Yon about his experiences in Baqubah. Michael is an embed with our armed forces in Iraq.

Michael's post is here. I quoted from that post including the following:

At first, he said, they would only target Shia, but over time the new al Qaeda directed attacks against Sunni, and then anyone who thought differently. The official reported that on a couple of occasions in Baqubah, al Qaeda invited to lunch families they wanted to convert to their way of thinking. In each instance, the family had a boy, he said, who was about 11 years old. As LT David Wallach interpreted the man’s words, I saw Wallach go blank and silent. He stopped interpreting for a moment. I asked Wallach, “What did he say?” Wallach said that at these luncheons, the families were sat down to eat. And then their boy was brought in with his mouth stuffed. The boy had been baked. Al Qaeda served the boy to his family.

Since that time, Michael has issued an email message indicating that he was not able to confirm the above. Additionally, he has made it clear in subsequent posts on his site that he is continuing to seek independent verification of this story as he travels throughout Baqubah.

Ruth questioned this story and asked the opinion of an Israeli acquaintance that offered the following:

It's obviously apocryphal, there is no substantiation of it and it is a very common rumour, as I said. It has appeared from time to time in many situations, from the Inquisition onwards and probably before that. There is a sociological issue, or button, that is pushed whenever cannabalism is mentioned and it is very common to accuse one's enemies of it to demonise them. It's done by most cultures who want to de-humanise their opposition. It has a parallel in the "Jews use the blood of Christian Children to make matzoh" slander common in Poland and other eastern european nations in the 16-20th centuries, also.

Ruth's friend has a bit more to say, but that is the meat of it.

Thanks, Ruth, for pointing out the error.

I hope everyone will stay tuned with Michael Yon as he continues to report from the front-lines all the things that should make the headlines....but don't.

by Dann 

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