Your faithful, if spotty-logic’d blogger is married to a retired career military man. Her Minotaur spent a number of years with the guys in the pretty almost Robin Hoodish green hats, and so she takes a special interest in the doings of the Sci Fi Green Beanie dudes. She well understands they are always tools at the command of the current Idiot in Chief and it makes her itch to think on it long.

Since Georgia was one of the Coalition, we had been sending those guys with “Silver Wings” on their chests to train and work with Georgian troops for a while. And about 130 Americans were in country when Russia attacked. I am presuming that the military ones were Special Forces, but could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. Oh, please, oh please—whatever deities may be, let me be oh so totally wrong!! But if I am not wrong, whether they were there for innocent reasons or not, it will now become a major pissing point.

The contention is that THEY were motivating the Georgian attack on South Ossetia. The Pentagon claims that 35 “civilian contractors” (would that be the bravos of KBR?) have left the country and that the 95 US servicemen left in country are all accounted for and “none killed.” And why ARE the military men still there? Why haven’t all the Americans left the freaking country?

But the Russians are claiming to have the body of a “dark skinned Georgian”….and who knew they could practice sarcasm so well? Russia threatens to do DNA tests if needed. Well, I don’t know how that will help them since those tests do not come up with red, white, and blue markers and we certainly aren’t likely to offer them anything to match their sample against. But I wonder if some family is sitting in barely contained horror right now?

I recall too well when my Minotaur would tell me it was “exercise time” and would vanish for weeks on end—if not months. You see, they would disappear, with all their gear, into “quarantine” there on the post for an unannounced period of time and then simply be gone. Even a family member like me, with a past as a military analyst, couldn’t know if it was just games play in the woods or something real some place un-named. I used to hand-draw comic books for my toddlers to read as bedtime stories—making up all kinds of stuff that I surely hoped was what “Daddy” was doing. It really was better to avoid the news entirely and live in a kind of comic book fantasy for as long as possible. But almost every time, some woman’s fantasy shattered when she was notified that her husband had died in a “training accident.”  And yes, some of them were “just” training accidents….and others, well, less said the better was the rule.

And now, as Russia calls us on interference and a whole ‘nother level of “game playing,” I am swearing a lot….a whole lot. Because our side is not going to tell the truth to us, are they? We have heard the “American adviser” story before, so many times and in so many places that went so rapidly downhill. The media, being proper corporate team players, will keep this as quiet as possible, the Pentagon will pedal bedtime stories less believable than my hand-drawn comics. I wonder what this chess game means for our already over-extended military. And I wonder if some African American woman sitting in post housing is doing the same with her children, praying that he really is just away on exercise and not in a Russian morgue.