Rumsfeld Boosts Troop Morale

It was meant to be a morale boost. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who, like most war proponents, lives behind a desk far from flying shrapnel, while on his way to another very safe desk in Iraq, stopped in Kuwait to boost troop morale. But Army Spc. Thomas Wilson, with the 278th Regimental Combat Team on its way to meetings with bullets and shrapnel in Iraq, acted like a real human being and asked, "Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to up armor our vehicles? And why don't we have those resources readily available to us?"

Thus ambushed, Rumsfeld hid behind the nearest semantic barrier available, asking the soldier to repeat the question to give himself time to think of even a remotely plausible reply, but due to his chronic lack of preparation, his clips were empty. All the Secretary of Defense of the richest country in the world could come up with was "You go to war with the army you have and not the army you want or wish to have at a later time." And to drive the nail in the coffin for all the soldier funerals Bushwinkle will never attend in a million years, Rumsfeld went on to say warmheartedly that all the armor in the world still can't prevent a tank from blowing up. And by implication scattering smithereens of its occupants all over the landcsape, among them possibly the soldier now giving a career buttmunching desk jockey a pain in the ass.

Rummy just loves his men to death.