Poor career choices
Private Scott Thomas Beauchamp looks like he made two poor career choices so far. Neither soldier nor writer looks like a good fit for the young man. Jack Kelly:
Pvt. Beauchamp described how he made fun of a woman whose face had been severely scarred by an IED: “I love chicks that have been intimate with IEDS,” Pvt. Beauchamp quotes himself as saying, loudly, to his buddies in the chow hall. “It really turns me on — melted skin, missing limbs, plastic noses.”
“My friend was practically falling out of his chair laughing,” Pvt. Beauchamp recounted. “The disfigured woman slammed her cup down and ran out of the chow hall.”
Next he described finding the remains of children in a Saddam-era mass grave uncovered when his unit was constructing a combat outpost: “One private…found the top part of a human skull…He marched around with the skull on his head…No one was disgusted. Me included.”
Finally, Pvt. Beauchamp described another friend “who only really enjoyed driving Bradley Fighting Vehicles because it gave him the opportunity to run things over. He took out curbs, concrete barriers, corners of buildings, stands in the market, and his favorite target: dogs.”
Pvt. Beauchamp described how his friend killed three dogs in one day: “He slowed the Bradley down to lure the first kill in, and, as the diesel engine grew quieter, the dog walked close enough for him to jerk the machine hard to the right and snag its leg under the tracks.”…
the issue is not whether Pvt. Beauchamp is a soldier. It’s whether he’s telling the truth or not. And his story stinks to high heaven. No one else at the base ever seems to have a seen a woman who fits the description of the woman in the chow hall. No mass graves have been discovered during the time Pvt. Beauchamp has been at FOB Falcon. It is physically impossible for the driver of a Bradley to see a dog to the immediate right of his vehicle.
It would be better for Pvt. Beauchamp if he made his stories up. It breaks no military rule to BS gullible liberal journalists. But if Pvt. Beauchamp is telling the truth, he and his buddies have broken so many articles of the Uniform Code of Military Justice that I haven’t space to list them all.
Howard Kurtz had an additional quote from Pvt. Beauchamp: As both the military and the magazine investigate Beauchamp’s allegations, a personal blog surfaced in which Beauchamp said last year that each morning he feels “retarded for joining the army”. Hardly the army’s fault.
(More on this situation’s background from 2004 here.)
UPDATE
It’s almost half a year later and TNR finally threw in the towel, in a prolix, whiny sort of way.