Broken media, broken story about "broken" army

Ray Robison:

According to Mark Thompson, writer for Time magazine, America's army is broken. While it can not be argued that the military can possibly maintain the same state of readiness in war time as it does in peace time, broken has a certain specific ring to it: incapable, demoralized and poorly trained.

Mr. Thompson begins the article, - featured on the Drudge Report - with the story of Private Matthew Zeimer. Brave PVT Zeimer died within hours of his arrival at a Forward Operating Base in Iraq. Thompson describes PVT Zeimer's training before going on to make the case that the surge cut the young Private's training short. In Mr. Thompson's recounting of PVT Zeimer's tale, he essentially was killed because he had insufficient training.

If Zeimer's combat career was brief, so was his training. He enlisted last June at age 17, three weeks after graduating from Dawson County High School in eastern Montana. After finishing nine weeks of basic training and additional preparation in infantry tactics in Oklahoma, he arrived at Fort Stewart, Ga., in early December. But Zeimer had missed the intense four-week pre-Iraq training-a taste of what troops will face in combat-that his 1st Brigade comrades got at their home post in October. Instead, Zeimer and about 140 other members of the 4,000-strong brigade got a cut-rate, 10-day course on weapon use, first aid and Iraqi culture. That's the same length as the course that teaches soldiers assigned to generals' household staffs the finer points of table service.

Mr. Thompson finds confirmation from Congressman Murtha:

The truncated training-the rush to get underprepared troops to the war zone-"is absolutely unacceptable," says Representative John Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat and opponent of the war who chairs the House Appropriations defense subcommittee. A decorated Marine veteran of Vietnam, Murtha is experiencing a sense of déjà vu. "The readiness of the Army's ground forces is as bad as it was right after Vietnam."

Sounds like a pretty solid case doesn't it? But something just didn't sit right with me. I immediately knew this wasn't the full story. So I used a journalistic research tool, possibly unavailable to Time, called Google.

You see, this article makes the brave young Matthew Zeimer sound like an infantry soldier. Infantry soldiers go to the Infantry Training Brigade for 14 weeks of intense training after completing basic training. How can it be he didn't go? Is the army so bad off infantry soldiers don't go to Advanced Infantry Training anymore?

In my research, I found this article "Soldier's last days at home memorable" at the Billings Gazette. The article tells the story of the brave Private's short military career as told by his family and friends.

Matthew had come home on leave Nov. 8, after more than five months of basic training

Five months of basic training? What this article means is that he did nine weeks of Basic Training, which every soldier does, and then went for three more months of Advanced Individual Training in which a soldier trains on their MOS (Military Occupational Skill). About.com explains the process well:

Individuals who enlist under the 13X Infantry option attend Field Artillery OSUT (One Station Unit Training), which combines Army Basic Training and Field Artillery AIT (Advanced Individual Training), all in one course.

But most civilians just think of it all as basic training. The point being, this is three more months of a 24 hour a day resident course, tough as nails training that Mr. Thompson has neglected to mention. Three months is a significant amount of training.

And it doesn't stop there. According to the Billings Gazette:

Staff Sgt. Thad Rule, with the U.S. Army Recruiting Office in Glendive, said Matt joined the Future Soldier Program at the start of his senior year of high school, shortly after he turned 17. He spent nearly 10 months learning some of the basics about the Army, preparing him for his training.

Rule said Matt "wanted to do a combat job" and couldn't wait to join the Army. To speed things up, he opted to undergo artillery support training rather than going into the infantry, a move that got him into the Army a month earlier.

Not only did PVT Zeimer do three more months of training than Thompson lets on, he spent ten months of training before he even went in the army. While this certainly does not equate to training in an active duty setting, it is a training opportunity that most soldiers don't get. In real terms, this brave young man was ahead of the training that a typical artillery junior enlisted soldier received when I was an artillery officer in the mid-90s under President Clinton.

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Mr. Thompson's article also states:

Under cover of darkness, Sunni insurgents were attacking his new post from nearby buildings. Amid the smoke, noise and confusion, a blast suddenly ripped through the 3-ft. concrete wall shielding Zeimer and a fellow soldier, killing them both.

What Mr. Thompson doesn't tell the reader is than the soldier that was killed with PVT Zeimer was "Spc. Alan E. McPeek, a 20-year-old who had been in Iraq for 14 months" according to the Gazette. Of course, it's difficult to make a soldier appear to have died due to lack of training when the soldier who died next to him was a 14 month combat veteran, isn't it?

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There is more.

It is getting harder for the media to get away with this kind of dishonest reporting. It is agenda journalism that takes facts out of perspective and pushes in this case an excuse to lose the war which is what reporters at some publications and what Rep. Murtha want. They are looking for reasons not to go on and win and they are not interested in letting the facts get in the way of that agenda.

Robison goes on to point out that the soldier got additional training in desert warfare in Kuwait before he went into Iraq. A question I have is how he picked this soldier to pick on. Was he fed this misinformation by Congressman Murtha? Someone should ask him if this was a Murtha setup.