Bush and Nukes?

Yeah, just forget the economy went through the roof while he was in office, gave us enough drama to fill tabloids for years to come and played the Sax.
 
Originally posted by LeHah
Yeah, just forget the economy went through the roof while he was in office, gave us enough drama to fill tabloids for years to come and played the Sax.
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Yep what a role moddle for the kids eh?

-Izouya
 
Personally, I'm tired of hearing the same old bullshit about Clinton every time somebody mentions his name. If you think he was such a bad president, why do you think he was re-elected?

As for basic training, I would think that anybody who watched Full Metal Jacket would have also seen the disadvantages of the training approach presented there. You don't actually need to take recruits to the edge of psychological breakdown in order to make good soldiers out of them.
 
Originally posted by LeHah
Yeah, just forget the economy went through the roof while he was in office, gave us enough drama to fill tabloids for years to come and played the Sax.
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Somehow I do not see the widening of the gap between the upper 1% and the rest of the nation to be "prosperity." I don't think that NAFTA ad FTAA are good things for my country. While they generate massive wealth for the main stockholders of US corporations, they have cost thousands of American jobs.

Trickle down economics doesn't work, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Clinton was a lip service liberal, you already don't like the guy for other reasons, don't defend him now.
 
Originally posted by Quarto
As for basic training, I would think that anybody who watched Full Metal Jacket would have also seen the disadvantages of the training approach presented there. You don't actually need to take recruits to the edge of psychological breakdown in order to make good soldiers out of them.
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the Full Metal Jacket training was what was going on during Vietnam. boot camp time was reduced to keep more and more soldiers going into Vietnam in a shorter amount of time, so the DIs had to turn up the training to get the recruits ready. now i agree that FMJ training is a bit extreme, but with clintons way, if a recruit can't handle the stress, instead of being washed out, the recruit waves his "leave me alone, i'm a pussy" card and all he learns is that if things get to bad, he can wave a card and everything will be better. Personally, i'd rather go through the FMJ training cause if you make it, you know you can handle it. boot camp is supposed to train you to kill people and break things, not to cry if the drill sergeant calls you names. if you do that, you don't have any business being in the military

and it looks as if we agree on something after all Ender
 
Originally posted by Quarto
As for basic training, I would think that anybody who watched Full Metal Jacket would have also seen the disadvantages of the training approach presented there.
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You mean Private Lawrence, aka Gomer Pyle? Well, he didn't seem to really help his cause (although I will admit that all the other recruits bashing him would have contributed to his...shall we say episode, later on. What Hartman was trying to do, I believe, was break them down so that he could mold them to be Marines. How else would they be able to kill young girls? I personally don't think that I would be able to do it. No matter what. That Richard Marcinko I mentioned, to him there are few things more frightening than child soldiers. His reasoning? They have no concept of death. They just kill. Add this to a lot of the other things that were in Vietnam. The mass graves of innocent people that the VietCong called out and then slaughtered. Marcinko's dirty tricks (if we are to believe him) which included leaving VC corpses cross legged, their heads in their laps, a smoking joss stick in their skull. Both sides snatching an enemy soldier, tortoring them and then killing them slowly. (Another Marcinko story was of a guy named Manny Tanto, who skinned VC like deer). Sniping, gurrilla warfare before the mainstream of Special Forces, booby traps, and more meant that Vietnam was, deservedably, known to many as the worst, scariest, spookiest war. I'll leave the treatment of the soldiers out of this for now, but I will say that the training of the Marines was probably justified. Besides, Stanley Kubrick told Lee Emrey, who played Hartman, that he wanted it real. Emrey's reply? 'I wouldn't give it to you any other way.'
 
Originally posted by Phillip Tanaka
What Hartman was trying to do, I believe, was break them down so that he could mold them to be Marines.
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the job of every Drill Instructor in the Marines.
 
Originally posted by WildWeasel
Oh, good. That means I won't have to travel too far to hunt you down and hurt you.
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I'm in Rochester, come get me-if you can stand the toxic Kodak fumes, that is.
 
Originally posted by Phillip Tanaka
What Hartman was trying to do, I believe, was break them down so that he could mold them to be Marines. How else would they be able to kill young girls?
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Right, because killing young girls is precisely what these so-called defenders of democracy are supposed to do. The examples you give seem to all argue that there was something seriously wrong with the soldiers in question. A man who would skin his enemies does not belong on the battlefield, he belongs in a mental ward. And yeah, the VC did the same things, but why should US soldiers imitate them? Morality is not relative - just because your enemy does something doesn't mean that it's the right thing for you to do.

Aries, you are correct in that soldiers do need to handle a high amount of stress. And I'm not saying that these yellow cards are a good idea - it's like giving students the right not to answer a teacher's question if they feel it's too tough for them. What I am saying, however, is that just because the proposed solution was stupid doesn't mean that the problem itself doesn't exist.
 
On the shooting of a girl, I'll try and rephrase that one. At the end of Full Metal Jacket, the soldiers who went through training under Gunnery Hartman are pinned down by a sniper. Somehow, the soldiers were able to storm the building to find that the sniper, firing wildly, was a young Vietnamese girl. I think that it was because of the training they had gone through that they were able to shoot her in self defence. Was it the right thing to do? Like I said, I don't think I would be able to do it. Should the VC symboligy have been used on them? Again, I wouldn't be cut out to be a soldier in that time. But the truth is, it happened. War isn't the way it's portrayed in Wing Commander or any other number of video games. War is not pretty or glorious. War, as it was accurately quoted, is hell. War brings out the worst in people, and the Vietnam war was unquestionably the worst war ever waged, because it was so dirty, so grusome, so unfair. The Normandy invasion at the start of Saving Private Ryan? That's clean, in so far as it was generally traditional combat, compared to Vietnam. As bad as how people shit on the soldiers who came back was, it was simply the straw that broke the camel's back. You'll be pleased to know, by the way, that Marcinko and Manny Tanto were not on the best of terms. Marcinko himself says that he wasn't shy about interrogating with a barry to someone's balls, but the skinning angered him severely, and he killed the VC to save him from further torture and fought with Tanto on a number of occasions before finally killing him. Of course, it's probably all a plot device to further the story. I'll leave it up to you to decide. If you want to read all the juicy details, get a hold of Rogue Warrior: Red Cell.
 
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