Those who have been defending Beauchamp are, of course, admitting they were wrong…

… well, actually they aren’t admitting they were wrong. Mostly they’re acting offended and superior and oh so scrupulously careful of the facts by concentrating on the fact that Sanchez is a former gay porn star and simply can not be trusted.

This guy is a joke and a fraud.

I didn’t believe that soldiers at a FOB where people they knew faced IED’s every day and people they knew may have been killed by IED’s would taunt an IED wounded person. (It’s a rather large assumption that was how she got hurt. There are a whole lot of other possibilities but it made a better story that she had a melted face from an IED instead of any other sort of accident.) And if someone was enough of a jerk to taunt a wounded lady I felt that other people in the DFAC would contrive an attitude adjustment. (Not that Beauchamp would include that part even if it happened.)

But at a base with a whole lot of people just passing through the dynamics change. First, did they speak loud enough for other people in the DFAC to hear? Second, did those other people hear enough that was rude enough to either… beat the crap out of someone outside of their CoC… or… motivate them enough to locate the *sshole’s chain of command and tell on them so they could do something unpleasant like that latrine burning thing from Jarhead?

At a FOB I would expect (rightly or wrongly) that most everyone knows everyone in a very short time. I would expect that there would be NCO’s or officers in the DFAC within Beauchamp’s CoC or who knew exactly what unit Beauchamp and his buddy were part of. The chances that those overhearing are aquainted with the woman go way up. The chances of immediate and creative unoffical correction go way up. The chance of someone with the duty to apply official correction go way up.

Very different from a place where those overhearing would have to go to a great deal of effort to do something about it.

Probably more importantly… that the woman was in Kuwait utterly destroys the narrative of “the dehumanizing affect of war.” They hadn’t *been* to war yet. They were what they were before they ever got there.

This whole thing reminds me so much of John Kerry. For those not aware, Kerry’s start in public life was his 1971 testimony before Congress in which he painted U.S. troops in Vietnam as the baby-killing army of Genghis Khan. In the decades since, Kerry’s account has been largely if not entirely discredited. But at the time, Kerry went on to lead an “anti-war veterans’” group, some of whose most public faces were not at all veterans, but “wannabe” liars/phonies (what we would now call Jesse Macbeths). Read all about it here: http://wintersoldier.com/

Kerry did the above while still in Naval Reserve uniform, i.e., he did not wait to be discharged from his unit. Moreover, it turns out that the only person in Kerry’s unit who acted like Genghis Khan was Kerry. In his memoirs, he recounts shooting a fleeing Vietnamese in the back and personally setting fire to a village with his “Zippo lighter”. Kerry’s comrades, even those who support him politically, state to a man that no one else in their unit acted like that. And Kerry should have been reporting such incidents, if they did happen. Not helping create them.

Now we learn that the only one-of-two to laugh at the disfigured woman – in Kuwait, not Iraq – was Beauchamp. Like Kerry before him, Beauchamp knew the story he wanted to tell well in advance, and in some ways, set about himself creating it.

Beauchamp’s actions are less spectacular and less dramatically false than Kerry’s. But the basic intent and action is the same as Kerry’s: Make a public name and score cherished political points, by slandering one’s comrades in the unit.

But he saw her EVERY DAY, right? Right at the same place he was writing the stories? And he couldn’t remember that it hadn’t actually happened there?

So, let’s get this straight: Some “eff’n noob” is going to come to a jumpoff base, where he will undoubtedly meet many soldiers who have “seen the elephant,” and he’s going to start making fun of a presumed IED victim? Is that what we’re supposed to believe? Does that fit into your worldview?

It doesn’t mine.

I am content to wait for the official report, where a proper investigation with threats of courts martial will get these guys to tell their stories.