The other day, Jeremy Scahill decided to go ahead and tweet a picture of me wearing my Ranger t-shirt out at a bar in Brooklyn.  No one in the bar seemed to care about it, but the Twitter commandos sure did.  There was a decent sized shit storm of vegan lesbians calling for blood in the streets.  They were both upset by the expression on the shirt but also the grammatical error of “your” instead of “you’re.”

The shirt is made by Blackside Concepts, which is owned by a 1/75 veteran named “Marty”, the same dude who wrote the Ranger Knowledge Handbook under the pen name Erik Larson.

I make no apologies.  Since the post on Twitter, the picture of me is now making the rounds on both Twitter and Facebook.  The self-righteous are out there disgusted with the shirt, saying there is no way I’m a Ranger, and what the fuck ever else. Tough titties, folks. The expression is taken from a sign posted by Charlie Rangers in Vietnam.  On the sign they used incorrect grammar.

These were young men drafted to go fight the communist menace in Vietnam.  They manned up and did a thankless job, for which their country turned around and shit all over them.  The LRRP/Ranger companies were innovators and trail blazers before there was any such thing as “Special Operations.”  The modern-day Ranger Regiment stands on the shoulders of these men.  As Vietnam era Ranger Kenn Miller recently told me in an interview, today’s Rangers can take pride in the fact that their unit was literally battle born in the jungles of Vietnam.

If the expression on the back of the shirt offends you, then fuck you.  Is it the shirt that offends you, or is it young men expressing the reality that they lived in combat that makes you feel uncomfortable?  We’ve become so indoctrinated in political correctness that we believe war is a sterile, bloodless affair.  In other words, we believe our own bullshit.  When reality hits us, these days on YouTube videos more often than not, the public is shocked because the movies and video games they grew up playing lied to them as to what war is really like.

I 100% support and applaud my friend Marty’s decision to keep this shirt historically accurate when he printed it.  This is a guy who appreciates the nuances of particularities of military history.  I respect him for retaining the grammatical error, even though the backlash against “dumb Rangers” may hurt his business financially.  Then again, if it pisses you off then this shirt wasn’t made for you to begin with.

So for those interweb commandos out there talking shit about the Rangers, myself, or Marty’s business, please feel free to direct them here and remember: you don’t have the right to not be offended.