Homeless Diver

I have to agree with Nick on this, some people simply cannot keep themselves from embellishing the facts.  Having been in the military and again in war in civilian capacity, I can vouch that a great many people call home with ‘war stories’. He references a story on military.com that reeks of a bunch of hooey that seems to be todays calling card for gaining sympathy for those that have otherwise un-extraordinary lives in the military/gov’t sectors. Just because you ‘were there’ does not make you a fucking hero. Nick is a contractor on Antarctica, (and has experience in Iraq as well).

I like his take on this. The most interesting parts are the comments that came back to slam him from POV’s assuming fellow Ice Folk identities.

I once had another blog where I slammed the military and contractors alike for calling/writing home about how ‘dangerous’ it was… when none of these people experienced anything more dangerous than high cholesterol from the 4x daily buffet of all-you-can-eat DFAC meals. I would regularly get nasty grams about how insensitive I was to the war fighters.

One rather large group of correspondence was from the friends of a particular person that is now part of those fictitious Pajamas Media ‘experts’. He lied blatantly and embellished everything so bad that one blog entry claimed to have a mortar hitting next to his trailer when it was actually 4 kilometers away outside CP-1 (which I had to do the report on). He talked about having to endure the hardships of eating bland military food when he was actually only issued a single MRE for the flight over and had access to the Embassy chow hall at 4 meals a day…. and it was great food. I had his billeting info, his work schedule, his civilian work history, his palace office info & tasking, ..everything. I was not part of the RSO and the info was nonsecured. His was a social agenda - so was mine.

Even after calling out this supercool cat, his friends then slammed me for the act of ‘calling out’ instead of admiting their friend was a craptastic lier.

UPDATE: these are two different stories I had thought were in the same area. The fire was a huge area of squatters that were filled with burka wearing women selling souvenirs at tons of stalls and had partially clothed kids running amok. Personally, I disliked walking thru there, it felt like taking a wrong turn in a bad neighborhood. They had tried kicking them out before but the wire was ripped down and they moved right back into the buildings.

One thing happened for sure—- there were gunshots fired, buildings on fire, lots of tear gas. A friend of mine was pulled out of the tear gas by police when they saw him as being a distinctly ‘old white guy’.

• http://beta.philstar.com/Article.aspx?articleId=413436
  
• http://www.gmanews.tv/story/131761/Fire-violence-mar-demolition-operation-in-Boracay
• http://www.abs-cbnnews.com/nation/regions/11/06/08/fire-guts-20-boracay-homes-violent-police-demolition
• http://www.gmanews.tv/story/131908/Aussie-resort-owner-holed-up-in-disputed-Boracay-lot
• http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/regions/view/20081107-170698/Demolition-in-Boracay-turns-violent
• http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/gunmen-holding-us-australians/2008/11/07/1225561054249.html

just do a google search on the word “contractor” and “killed”. In the past, no one was ever labeled as a “contractor”. like the guy killed at the stadium by a pallet skid…says ‘contractor killed’. Well, duh. But in the past it would have been a person, a worker, etc… was killed. But now the connotation is that contractors are bad and if they got killed, it was somehow the fault of himself or his contacting company. All the services done by just about any city in the USA are contracted jobs. highway maintenance, sewage, electricity, phone building maintenance, ….all of it. Those people aren’t on the cities payroll, they are paid by the company that won the contract.

Been that way for a long, long time. But all of a sudden, its become necessary to use the label ‘contractor’ to set the tone of negativity.