BS: Brave US soldier in Canada

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: GUEST,Clint Keller
Date: 31 Oct 03 - 02:51 AM

Chip, accordiing to the story he did his time, did his job, and stood up for his word and his obligation. Killed more men than anyone in his outfit.

But killing humans who are much like themselves is hard for some men, and it's so hard that it's more than some of them can bear, and they break. Anyone -- anything -- will break under too much strain.

Even you.

clint

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: GUEST,Chip2447
Date: 31 Oct 03 - 01:38 AM

Lets see, VOLUNTEERED for the military, and wants out because of the job. TOUGH SHIT!!! He should have weighed the consquences before he signed the papers. Do your time, do your job, stand up for your word and the obligation that you made, then take your separation when it comes around. You don't like it, transfer to a non combat MOS.

He really didn't expect to ACTUALLY go to a combat zone did he?

Was he that close to his discharge date? If so, it was just plain stupidity.

Boot his ass back to Canada or give him a free ride in LEAVENWORTH for desertion.

CHIP2447

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: GUEST,pdc
Date: 31 Oct 03 - 12:31 AM

The Roper story was shown on CBC News tonight, and it was heartbreaking. He is a quiet, softspoken man who was obviously in deep distress. His mother was shown crying, saying his heart was shattered into a thousand pieces. He is returning to the US to face military punishment, followed by discharge.

He was apparently working on an oil rig in Texas when 9/11 occurred, and he was so appalled that he enlisted.

Sad, sad story. One of thousands, I suspect.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Bobert
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 11:08 PM

Michael:

Apparently you have not heard. The Bush folks have a "gag order" on showing any coffins.... This is fir real... You won't see any... No way...

Once the remains have been returned to the family then all's fair... But no coffins coming out of Iraq! None....

Hey, PR folks orders... And we're spendon' millions and millions of our tax dollars on George Bush's friggin' PR folks so, hey, you'd hate to not get yer money's worth, would ya?

Beam me up...

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: artbrooks
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 10:57 PM

Sounds like he was only a day or two short of being discharged, so a desertion charge is unlikely. I hope he gets the medical treatment he needs, and it is possible (but complicated) to get it in Canada at VA expense.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Amos
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 10:46 PM

The most courageous, and the only morally defensible, course of action for any of them is to desert.


IF you believed you were actually restraining anarchy while a renewed civilization was being set up, wouldn't you feel it was moral to stay?

A

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: michaelr
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 10:12 PM

Remember seeing on TV the flag-draped coffins coming back from Vietnam? Anyone notice you haven't seen any of that lately? That's because the Resident put the kibosh on such images... they can't be shown, can't even be taped, anymore. The bastards know that seeing that will get the American public upset, and make them question the legitimacy of this war. Can't have that, now, can we?

Bush has not attended a single military funeral of any of the kids he's getting killed over there. The most courageous, and the only morally defensible, course of action for any of them is to desert.

Cheers,
Michael

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: NicoleC
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 10:00 PM

Go in for counselling? The last guy that tried that is getting courtmartialled instead for "cowardice." This is NOT how our boys and girls deserve to be treated.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Bobert
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 09:53 PM

Yeah, I saw the piece on NBC news tonight. They did a poll of those US soldiers who are in Iraq and the news ain't good fir Bush and Rumsey... The workin' class folks (which equates to 100% of the forces) who are over there are gettin' a little fed up with a war that is increasingly seen as nuthin' more than yet another PR stunt by an evil and theivin' administration....

Hmmmmmmm? I wonder how long it's gonna take Joe Sixpack to figure the same thing out... Probably never.... Too busy watchin' NASCAR cars go round and round and round and round and round and....

.... the beat goes on.....

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: mack/misophist
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 09:47 PM

Most countries do it. I know for a fact that the US, England, and Italy do it.
    When I was in high school, one of the teachers was drafted by the English abd US Armies simultaneously.
    A friend of mine, an Italian born American citizen, used to have to sneak into Italy to visit his relatives because, under Italian law, he was a draft dodger.
    Another friend, a German, was drafted by the English Army while living in England.
    Yet another friend, an American born citizen, was drafted by the Aussies while living there.
    The US had, and may still have, for all I know, a treaty with the Philippines that allowed Philippine nationals to get US citizenship by joining the US Navy.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 09:33 PM

Gotta point there! US news is always speaking of how we are fighting forieners in Iraq (other forieners than us...) cheers Larry

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: GUEST
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 09:31 PM

I thought Canada wasn't going to take US deserters and draft dodgers after their experiences during VN. Of course, if he is a Canadian citizen, that might be different. US citizens would most likely be extradited home, and there are no draft dodgers this time.

Poor chap. Why didn't he go for counseling? It's available.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 09:00 PM

I wasn't putting him down for being a mercenary, by reason of fighting in another country's army - my father fought in the British army in the Second World War, even though Ireland was neutral. My meaning was, wouldn't it be likely to put him into the definition of "mercenary".

If he got captured by some country operating the same rules as the USA surely he'd have been likely to be classed as "an illegal combatant"?

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 08:47 PM

FOLKS!!! THE LINK IS AT THE TOP OF THE ARTICLE!!!!!!!!!!!!! Also, just google Roper, Canada, Iraq and Soldier!
all the best
Larry

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Gareth
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 08:30 PM

Three feathers ? White ones ? Sorry Larry not credible without the links.

Gareth

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 08:15 PM

No, a lot of working class guys join the US army to get citizenship, I suppose it is some kind of mercenarism or international poverty draft. Jim Power, the great Irish mosaic artist in New York became a US citizen after going to Nam. Cheers Larry

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: McGrath of Harlow
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 08:12 PM

If he's from Canada what was he doing in the US Army in the first place? Wouldn't that class him as a mercenary?

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Bobert
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:57 PM

Yeah, the cannon fodder is startin' to figure it out... Body bags from the eworkin' class comin' home while *cash* bags going to the ruling class....

Don't take the Wes Ginny slide rule to tell ya' which way the wind blows....

Wait 'til smoke settles after this little rip off of the American workin' class, not to mention the Iraqi people, and Bush and his neo-cons will need some thick walls to hide behind with their friggin' money...

Good on anyone who wants quit this crap and if ya' need a place to crash, let me know.....

Resist the anti-human bullsh*t!!!

Bobert

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: artbrooks
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:53 PM

Not on MSNBC or ABC, not on NPR, can't find it on AP or UPI, and I don't watch TV. Please let me know if you run across a link.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:51 PM

A bit more from the article above...
'Decided to take off'

April Roper, a slender 26-year-old woman with almond-shaped glasses and long, dark hair, said her husband seemed excited to be home when he returned in the summer. They live on Dixie Road, a leafy neighborhood of Fort Campbell military housing.

When he saw their children, now 6 and 3, he started to cry. Within 10 days, he got worse. His wife saw a "look in his eyes" she had never seen and still cannot describe. He would bolt upright in bed and stay awake for hours. Once, she woke to see him staring at her strangely. "I grabbed him around the neck and said, 'Please, let's go to bed.' "

He never went into detail about what happened to him in the war, and she never asked. But he told her "he could see things still, the horrific things he had seen. He said he'd hear screaming."

She felt helpless: "How can you help somebody you can't relate to or understand what is happening?"

At least, she felt, his soldier days were about to end. The Army was "chaptering" him out, meaning he would once again be just Citizen Roper. Then he disappeared, failing to report to duty Oct. 7. Since then, the Army has considered him absent without leave.

"He was in the process of clearing when he decided to take off," said Sgt. 1st Class Mark Hess.

April Roper last spoke to her husband from the Canadian border the night before he disappeared. She'd driven 20 hours north to see her sick grandmother, taking the children. She and her husband had been arguing about something, she said, so they didn't talk long. Over the next few days she learned from a sergeant that her husband had left the base.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:46 PM

http://www.sunspot.net/news/nationworld/iraq/bal-te.soldier26oct26,0,3871536.story?coll=bal-iraq-headlines


Here is the address above, and a bit of the piece to wet the appitite..
By Scott Calvert
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published April 11, 2003



NAJAF, Iraq - The three hand-drawn feathers on the back of Pfc. Tyrone Roper's Kevlar helmet are not the idle doodles of a bored soldier. They are marks of a killer.

Roper, a 26-year-old soft-featured Native American from Canada, has three confirmed kills in the war with Iraq, more than any other member of the 3rd Battalion, 327th Infantry Regiment.

His battlefield feats have made him something of a star in Bravo Company.

The comrades who came up with the feather idea pat him on the back, call him Savage and say they wish they could do what he did.

Again and again, they ask how it feels to drop an enemy soldier with a pointed 5.56 mm bullet the length of a man's pinky finger.

Around them he will flash a smile and speak with pride of doing what he had to do, and doing it well. Quietly, though, he will admit he has been thinking about the people whose lives he ended.

It's not guilt exactly, just a recognition that however bad these men may have been, however eager they were to kill him with an AK-47 assault rifle, they were people.

"The next day, I started to feel I killed someone, took away somebody's grandfather, somebody's father, somebody's son," he says, lying in the sand during a down period. "I kind of felt how my wife would feel if I never came home."

Shooting to kill is an elemental part of an infantryman's job description. It is, as any number of soldiers will remind you, what they are trained to do. A doctor is taught to save people, soldiers are taught to kill them. And because soldiers on the other side can be expected to think the same, it is kill or be killed as far as they are concerned.

Yet the vast majority of soldiers in this 700-person battalion have never killed anyone. Before the war, most had never been shot at by anyone, had never shot at anyone, had never seen real combat.

'You're doing your job'

Now that they are here in the combat zone, soldiers are reflecting on what it means to kill.

Only Bravo Company's troops have killed combatants for certain - a dozen or so plus two caught in crossfire. Alpha and Charlie, the other two companies, have had firefights, but if any enemy soldiers fell it was not clear, says Lt. Col. Ed Palekas, the commander.

There sits Roper with not one, not two, but three feathers on his helmet.

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:41 PM

It was on NBC 6:30 news. Perhaps it is on line on NBC's web, I think his name was Roper. Cheers Larry

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: artbrooks
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:33 PM

Where can I read the interview, and has it been validated that this person is really a soldier on leave?

Subject: RE: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: Gareth
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:12 PM

I am glad to see that he can justify his actions.

Gareth

Subject: BS: Brave US soldier in Canada
From: InOBU
Date: 30 Oct 03 - 07:09 PM

It turns out, in order to deal with the fact that military polls show the majoirity of US soldiers in Iraq are open about their low moral, there are 15 day leaves being granted. A large number of US soldiers are not coming back from their leaves. One was interviewed in Canada. He said he can't sleep thinking about the people he killed, and he is tired of being shot at. His is real bravery. The bravery to do the right thing at the risk of your freedom. Bless him.
Larry