Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., commanding general, 82nd Airborne Division, quoted in the Fayetteville Observer (“82nd Troops To Fill Iraq Gap”, 20 Dec. 2003):

The Department of Defense is concerned about the transition of troopers this spring and sustaining the continuity of effort for stability in Iraq. They need special troops to fill this “gap” in order to smoothly transition troops into and out of Iraq. Our paratroopers would have it no other way in these times that require the best of the best to give a little more.

Reaction from a friend of mine with family in the 82nd:

ROFL.

The paratroopers are pissed. They’re being sent to Iraq because someone else isn’t ready to do their job. When this battalion came back to Afghanistan, they came back a month or later than they were supposed to because the idiots that were replacing them shipped their gear by boat (to a landlocked country) and the boat got rerouted to Iraq where nobody knew what to do with it, and they couldn’t go out without their gear.

The people I talked to all seem to have a sense that the 82d is being abused to cover up other peoples’ fuckups.

I’m sure Gen. Swannack knows this is how his troopers feel. Predicting it wouldn’t exactly take a Ph. D. in organizational psychology. What’s interesting to me is that he feels compelled to say stuff like this (not just to the press, but to the troopers’ families, who must know better), and that the press feels compelled to print it.