RE: http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,89802,00.html

Is anyone responding to this, or are others, like myself, concerned about being identified by the very military secrecy types we are discussing, here?

(Who is winning in Iraq???)

Halaburton and the Bush oil empire.

Well, and again, no one should be surprised. They do go to extremes to gather information and to me, 9 out of 10 times it will have a negative impact on a persons service.

A quick story about our son, a Marine. And this can be checked out on the web.

One early morning (2:00 am), our son received a phone call from a friend. This friend had stopped on the side of the road to ostensibly take a leak. A police cruiser pulled in behind with lights on and determined this person was drunk. But because this person knew some of the same people (the culprit was a security guard at a local hospital) the cop decided to be a nice guy and let him call someone to pick him up and take him home.

Our son being the good guy he is, goes and picks him up. As they are driving to this persons home, the culprit says something like 'it's a good thing he didn't search me and he pulls out a .357' and starts playing with Wyatt Earp with it. Our son was very calm and convinced him to give him the gun until they arrived at his house. He drops the guy off, our son heads home.

At 7:00 am our home is surrounded by MA & CT State Police. I answer the door and they ask for our son. As this is happening they hand me a piece of paper impounding our sons car. The police ask our son to accompany them back to MA. He goes, I tell him don't answer a thing until our lawyer is with him. I happen to glance over at our sons car, the passenger door is open and all you can see is blood on the seat and carpet...now I'm concerned and scared.

We arrive at the MA State Police barracks, and the questioning begins. I'll eliminate all of what transpired...the guy he gave a ride home to murdered someone 10 minutes before he was parked on the side of the road and telling the cop he was just taking a leak, he had murdered his best friend...he was tossing a couple of weapons into a pond and not taking a leak as he told the cop.

Anyway, with our son being in the Marine Corps, the military got involved and from that point onward, our son was harrassed despite the fact he had nothing to do with what happened (though the police did begin to insinuate he did during questioning.

Our son gets shipped off to Iraq on another tour and lo and behold, the trial begins while he is in Iraq. The police show up at our door with a subpoena for him to show up and tesify. I tell them, gonna be difficult seeing as he was in Iraq. They go to the base and by the time everything is done, a Federal subpoena is issued to return our son from Iraq for the trial because his CO in Iraq refused to let him return (another part of the nightmare). The State of Massachusetts spends more than $4,000 bucks to get him home as the military refused to transport him!

The end of the story, the guy gets convicted, gets life with no possibility of parole. Our son after the trial gets grilled again by the military. They don't send him back to Iraq as he only had four weeks left on the tour by the time the trial ended. But they made our son's life miserable and it is the main reason why he will be leaving the Marine Coprs when his enlistment is over November 8 of this year.

I shudder to think about the file they must have on our son and at times wonder if it will come back to haunt him. From everything I witnessed and heard, they were more convinced our son had something to do with the crime when in fact he had nothing to do with it. Many people in the Marine Corps community treated him differently after this episode and they had no reason to. Needless to say, our son will never again give someone a ride and will not be Mr. Nice Guy.

S/F Gordon