[Guest]

Gary Brecher is a war nerd. What is a war nerd I hear you ask?

Here is an excerp from a UPI interview. FOLKS THIS GUY IS FUNNY AS HELL AND HE IS A STRAIGHT SHOOTER. BAM!
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=200 ... 4252-5669r

Q. When journalists like Nicholas D. Kristof of The New York Times op-ed page describes various wars in Africa as "senseless," are they making sense?

A. That's the best question you asked. No, it's absolute BS but nobody calls them on it. If you guys were doing your job, they couldn't get away with it, but they do. When Kristof says "senseless," he means he doesn't WANT TO KNOW about it. He won't even try to think like the people doing the fighting. Try doing that and see if it still seems senseless.

Here you've got one kind of war, the "sensible" kind with uniforms, "rules of war," and big battles like Jena or Verdun. That kind means you stand up and walk into cannon fire, grapeshot or machine-gun fire and massed artillery, and all you get out of it is a few dollars a month, and if you decide to quit on your own, they hang you. How is that sensible?

Now take African war. You have these neighbors you hated since forever, and you decide to do something about it. You get together quiet with the rest of your tribe and jump the enemy village while they're sleeping and kill everybody except maybe the cute girls, then you take all their stuff and burn their houses and take the girls home to be slaves.

Maybe I'm crazy, but that sure makes more sense to me than getting your head blown off for the glory of king and country. Kristof makes a living not even trying to understand how there are people in the world who don't think like him. Nobody wants to see how other people think, it's disgusting.

Brecher writes for a place called eXile my God I was in stiches, this guy is brutal and straight to the point.

Talking about Sudan
http://www.exile.ru/2004-May-27/war_nerd.html
No hoses in Darfur -- you lug in every bucket of water by hand, with an AK on your back in case anybody else gets possessive about the well, or spring, or whatever miserable hole you get your stinking, muddy water from. You have to sleep in the fields to keep people from stealing your birdseed (cause that's what millet is), praying to Allah that the locusts don't drop in for a little fast food. Drag yourself home when it's dark, beat your wife for a little stress relief, fall asleep listening to your favorite kid coughing up its lungs, then get up at dawn and do it all again.

Damn, it sounds so awful it almost makes my life seem OK.


Talking about the RPG-7
http://www.exile.ru/2004-April-29/war_nerd.html
They're the weapons that matter, because they're already out there, millions of units, enough to equip every guerrilla army in the world, simple enough that you can teach a peasant kid with hookworm and a room-temperature IQ to fire them, and cheap enough to buy in bulk.

[Concerned]

Helps if you login before you post I started this thread.

[stu]

Love this guy. Funny, honest and doesn't give a Expletive deleted..