The American Spectator

One [soldier] wrote in an e-mail: “I can wholeheartedly verify the finding of the bones; U.S. troops (in my unit) discovered human remains in the manner described in 'Shock Troopers.' [sic] … [We] did not report it; there was no need to. The bodies weren't freshly killed and thus the crime hadn't been committed while we were in control of the sector of operations.” On the phone, this soldier later told us that he had witnessed another soldier wearing the skull fragment just as Beauchamp recounted: “It fit like a yarmulke,” he said. A forensic anthropologist confirmed to us that it is possible for tufts of hair to be attached to a long-buried fragment of a human skull, as described in the piece.

BR>Here is a classic case of moving the goal posts. The fact that a grave site was unearthed was never in dispute, no matter how much TNR wishes to use the fact that one was found (and that it could technically appear as Beauchamp described) — much as it sought to use the fact that Beauchamp turned out to be a real soldier — as proof positive that everything in the stories was true. The question here was the behavior of the soldier who supposedly “wore” the skull “for the rest of the day and night,” including under his helmet — something that “we all laughed” at, and that “nobody thought to tell him to stop” — and the best TNR could do was to get one soldier to say that “he had witnessed another soldier wearing the skull fragment”? p>THE THIRD STORY, that of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles being used to purposely run over dogs, still doesn't appear — to me, who has very little experience in them, but who also has a decent amount of time on the roads around FOB Falcon and western Baghdad — to pass the smell test. Part of the reason for this is the way that TNR went about “corroborating” the incident, reportedly speaking to the manufacturers of the Bradley about its driving specs, including its agility and acceleration. Further, TNR /I> had a soldier, who had allegedly “seen it done more than once,” tell it how a dog is run over (“when you approach the dog in question, suddenly lurch the Bradley on the opposite side of the road the dog is on. The rear-end of the vehicle will then swing TOWARD the animal, scaring it into running out into the road. If it works, the dog is running into the center of the road as the driver swings his yoke back around the other way, and the dog becomes a chalk outline”). However, to me — again, as someone who has been there — this rings very, very hollow. After all, these kids are not in the states, it's not the “Back 40” of a military base, and there is still an NCO or officer in every vehicle — not to mention, as a soldier from FOB Falcon told the