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Are we sending known gang members to Iraq?
May 2, 2006Three violent Chicago area gangs and one from L.A. are showing their signs in a fairly unlikely place, nearly 6,500 miles from home.
Iraq.
Huh? It's not the locals either....it's our very own military.
An article in the Chicago Sun-Times sites an Army Reservist who has seen hundreds of graffiti examples of turf-claiming on buildings in Baghdad, tanks and even inside some of the barracks.
Military and Civilian police have admited to gang/soldier issues on three bases, Fort Lewis, Fort Bragg and Texas' own Fort Hood.
"I have identified 320 soldiers as gang members from April 2002 to present," said Scott Barfield, a Defense Department gang detective at Fort Lewis in Washington state. "I think that's the tip of the iceberg." from the Sun-Times article
What's scary is...are we training these gang members in urban warfare so when they return?
Posted by Jason Palmer at 1:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Comments
Jason: This happened during Vietnam, too. My brother served 13 months in Korea during the Vietnam War and then joined the Big Red One in Kansas as a company clerk. You can't imagine the number of GIs kicked out of the service for acts of violence they learned in Vietnam.
I remember being told by a colonel that when he was at Fort Carson, the order came down to send an entire brigade to Germany because we were below our committed troops level.
So the commanders found all the gangsters and trouble-makers and sent them to Germany.
Cut down on problems at Fort Carson for a long, long time.
