Friday, October 01, 2004
“Radicalized”
Brian Suits, a lieutenant in the US Army, and also a KVI host, is in Iraq. And he occasionally phones in live reports from the battlefield.
I’ve taken a great deal of my impressions about what’s really going on there from his reports. And Brian has consistently been optimistic, even when he was nearly killed by an RPG some time ago (near, near, NEAR miss).
The man is everything you want in a soldier: smart, observant, straightforward, and tough as a tank.
And so it was with some alarm that I heard him just now, on the radio.
As you may have heard, yesterday was a particularly bad day in Iraq. 35 children were murdered by a car-bomber. And what Brian said was that the bomber was gunning for US troops, him included. You see, he was there. On the scene.
He reported that the car-bomber drove through the crowd of children, intentionally, just to get to the US troops. Then detonated.
Brian described a scene from hell. Dismembered kids, and the limbs from which they’d been separated. And you could tell from how Brian was speaking that this got to him.
And then Brian took on a tone of voice, and an aspect of attitude, I’d never heard before. The man is enraged, and looking for somebody to punish for this. And he said something else: those people (the terrorists) should be worrying our people becoming “radicalized.”
Brian then cut loose with some comments that, though I agree completely, were not emblematic of how he usually sounds. He said that, when he gets back here, he knows he has a talk show to return to, and made it sound like a threat. And that he’s not interested, any longer, in hearing anything about the “Religion of Peace.” If you would have heard him you would have known exactly what he meant.
Kirby Wilbur (the morning host) kind of shut Brian down at that point, I think. To keep him from saying something he probably shouldn’t. That was probably a good move because Lieutenant Suits was very, very upset, even hours after the event.
But hearing him was particularly worrying because the man is a rock, and never gets perturbed. But, for the first time, I heard an unbridled and unabashed hate in his voice.
And I got the distinct feeling that it was an itch he is most definitely going to scratch.
Brian Suits, a lieutenant in the US Army, and also a KVI host, is in Iraq. And he occasionally phones in live reports from the battlefield.
I’ve taken a great deal of my impressions about what’s really going on there from his reports. And Brian has consistently been optimistic, even when he was nearly killed by an RPG some time ago (near, near, NEAR miss).
The man is everything you want in a soldier: smart, observant, straightforward, and tough as a tank.
And so it was with some alarm that I heard him just now, on the radio.
As you may have heard, yesterday was a particularly bad day in Iraq. 35 children were murdered by a car-bomber. And what Brian said was that the bomber was gunning for US troops, him included. You see, he was there. On the scene.
He reported that the car-bomber drove through the crowd of children, intentionally, just to get to the US troops. Then detonated.
Brian described a scene from hell. Dismembered kids, and the limbs from which they’d been separated. And you could tell from how Brian was speaking that this got to him.
And then Brian took on a tone of voice, and an aspect of attitude, I’d never heard before. The man is enraged, and looking for somebody to punish for this. And he said something else: those people (the terrorists) should be worrying our people becoming “radicalized.”
Brian then cut loose with some comments that, though I agree completely, were not emblematic of how he usually sounds. He said that, when he gets back here, he knows he has a talk show to return to, and made it sound like a threat. And that he’s not interested, any longer, in hearing anything about the “Religion of Peace.” If you would have heard him you would have known exactly what he meant.
Kirby Wilbur (the morning host) kind of shut Brian down at that point, I think. To keep him from saying something he probably shouldn’t. That was probably a good move because Lieutenant Suits was very, very upset, even hours after the event.
But hearing him was particularly worrying because the man is a rock, and never gets perturbed. But, for the first time, I heard an unbridled and unabashed hate in his voice.
And I got the distinct feeling that it was an itch he is most definitely going to scratch.
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