QUESTIONS ABOUT THE New Republic’s “Shock Troops” story that were raised at THE WORLDWIDE STANDARD late Wednesday continue to go unanswered. In fact, active duty soldiers and various experts have raised further doubts about almost all elements of the “Scott Thomas” account.
What we do know, according to the responses we’ve gotten so far, is that the badly burned woman described by Thomas does not seem to have served at FOB Falcon in the last 14 months. One active duty soldier who asks that his name be withheld writes in:
Another active duty reader writes in:
Interestingly, it’s the story Thomas tells of a soldier using his Bradley to kill stray dogs that has led vets and experts most confidently to assert that this is a work of fiction. Stuart Koehl, an expert on military hardware at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, writes in:
I am looking now at a 1/32nd scale model of a Bradley, and I can say with some assurance that the driver’s hatch is on the left side of the vehicle. Immediately to the driver’s right is the engine compartment, the cooling grill of which rises above the level of the driver’s hatch, making it impossible to see anything on the right side of the vehicle. Even if the driver was head-out, he still couldn’t see anything to his right below the level of the top deck (all armored vehicles have significant blind spots close in, which is why they need dismounts to protect them from RPG guys in foxholes). So, if, as the blog says, the driver “twitched” the Bradley to the right, he must have used extrasensory perception in order to catch the dog. Because there’s no way he knew the dog was even there.
And over at The Corner, a Desert Storm vet had this to say:
There’s a whole lot more like that from vets and active duty personnel whose experience with that particular vehicle informs their judgment that the story “Thomas” tells stretches beyond implausible and into fiction.
And finally, there is the story of the mass grave, which is nearly impossible to prove or disprove without the assistance of the military, but which readers point out is strangely reminiscent of a story that came out of Germany last year that had German soldiers in Afghanistan desecrating remains there.
< br> Other pictures show soldiers simulating oral sex with the skull, and one shows the troops having secured the skull to their vehicle like a bonnet mascot.
Suspiciously similar, but “Thomas” takes the story even further…his men were playing with the remains of children and one soldier, he says, wore a skull all day and night.
Of all the hundreds of comments and posts that have percolated throughout the blogosphere, to our knowledge not a single one is able to confirm a single aspect of “Thomas”‘s account. For example, no one who has served at FOB Falcon recalls the woman at the chow hall. And the latest email to come in, just two minutes old:
Frankly, I don’t believe ANY of this story. I’ve eaten in the Falcon chow hall and never saw anyone like the woman described.
And the man who wrote that…he stands behind his work: he keeps a blog at MattSanchez.typepad.com.
The New Republic has so far failed to address any of these questions.
Michael Goldfarb is online editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
