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thedrifter
03-23-05, 05:52 AM
Darkside To Paris: The French Await Their Gruesome Fate (Again)
March 22, 2005



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by Bob Newman
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The call came tonight as I sat in front of my computer wondering what to write about.

Darkside has always come through like that.

Lieutenant Colonel Bryan P. “Darkside” McCoy, United States Marine Corps, was at the other end. He is the Marine who ordered the now famous tearing down of the statue of Saddam in Baghdad’s Firdus Square. Bryan and I are old friends from another lifetime in the 2 nd Marine Division; I was his company gunnery sergeant and he was my company commander. “Darkside” was his radio call sign in Iraq. Author John Koopman’s new book, McCoy’s Marines: Darkside to Baghdad, is where his call sign gained notoriety. (The book’s cover features Bryan’s filthy war visage with a Cohiba cigar clamped in it. One look at that mug, that “war face” in the Corps’ lexicon, and you know he means to do great harm to anyone stupid enough to face him.)

“Bob,” he said after I said hello.

“Yeah?” came my suspicious reply. (The caller ID had failed.)

“McCoy.”

“Bryan!” I shouted. In the corner of my left eye I could see my wife smile.

The best officer who had ever commanded me wanted to shoot the breeze and tell me about a writing project he had been assigned as a student in a school for senior military officers. He wanted to give me the basics of the lengthy paper and warn me that he was sending it to me for my “chop.” Of course, there will be little if anything I could add, as Bryan surely doesn’t need me to edit his paper. But he has always used me, and a tiny group of other staff non-commissioned officers he knows, as sounding boards. That’s one of the character traits that make him so dangerous to people he wants to kill.

Last summer he stopped by on his way from California to Washington after leading his battalion through two tours in Iraq in the most brutal combat the Corps had seen since Vietnam. We sat out back in the comfort and general pleasantness of my backyard. We ate, drank and smoked cigars. I got him to do most of the talking because, although I, too, am a combat veteran of the Corps, what he had just gone through twice was beyond my experience.

Tonight’s call also included news that he is heading to France on his school’s debate team to debate the French military.

I managed to compose myself after a few moments and asked why the Corps would do something so evil as to send its most impolitic, vicious killer to a place like France to debate that hapless country’s embarrassing military. His modesty made him change the topic.

That’s Bryan.

Selected for promotion to colonel, this summer he will accept a position developing combat training for the Corps. It is a perfect billet for him between wars. The Marines he will train will be substantially more professional killers having been trained by Bryan. His new job is the worst possible news for current and future enemies of America.

God help the French, who are about to he tormented and humiliated by this modern-day Genghis Khan.

And no one will be able to help the doomed dregs he next faces on the field of battle, in some distant clime and place.

Bob Newman

Ellie