Baghdad-Bound Soldiers in the US Military: Take Off Your Clothes!

I looked and looked and nowhere did I see my brilliant idea on how Congress can block the Bush Administration’s plan to send an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq. Refuse to buy them plane tickets. OK, so they don’t fly over on a commercial airline, I know that. It was symbolic. What I meant was, no pilot gets paid to drive a troop transport plane TO Iraq. No oil company gets paid for the jet fuel to put in the transports. No air traffic controller gets paid to clear them for takeoff.

But no. No one ever listens to me. It could be that it’s because no one reads this blog but O’Day Drilling Company (Pearland, Texas), people who are looking for illustrations of Krishna, romance novel writers who are still wondering when Susan Combs is going to come out with her next steamy novel, Reston, Virginia (I suppose we all get those hits), and a few readers of Susan’s non-blog.

No, wait, I distinctly remember seeing a hit from house.gov. But that was probably before I came up with my brilliant plan.

Well, now I have another brilliant plan and I hope someone picks up on it.

Ladies and gentlemen of the armed services. If you don’t want to get sent to patrol the streets in that meat grinder known as Baghdad, do this: get naked.

Seriously. Get naked and photographed, and then have the photos published in magazines. One California transplant based on Lackland AFB in San Antonio, Texas has it all figured out.

Military brass hates that. Witness one Staff Sgt. Michelle Manhart who had the audacity to get photographs of herself, in and out of uniform, splashed on the pages of Playboy Magazine. As a result of her actions Staff Sgt. Manhart “has been relieved of her duties pending an investigation, according to Lackland AFB spokesman Oscar Balladares”.

So if Congress won’t help, you’ve got to take matters into your own hands. If history tells us anything, when you go this route you buy yourself an accelerated discharge schedule. The Chron article goes on to mention two previous women in the military, both sailors, who found themselves permanently placed onshore, duffle bag in hand.