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bdickens wrote:I submit that a man wearing nail polish is not normal, definitely suspicious, but hardly presents justification for the police to stop him.

Well it depends......is it on his toes or fingers?

txmatt wrote:http://youtu.be/A8r4MK3R4PI

According to his own account, the police approached him, grabbed at his rifle without warning, and then he jumped back and told them they were not taking his rifle. He then proceeds to complain for 10 minutes, insulting the police threatening to sue and so forth.

I'd say this could have been handled much better on both sides.

Yep.

flechero wrote:I normally agree with you, TAM, but am not on this one, at least not yet.

I don't know Grisham but as a Bell County resident, I know the temple PD's reputation. I'll give a local Soldier the benefit of the doubt... especially in this area on a firearms related arrest, with charges already being reduced... as there have been some really unfortunate happenings here, and this fits a pattern.

Messaging someone you don't know on facebook probably isn't the best way to see their true character - he may have had 20 other messages attacking him that day and yours was lumped into them. A little curious as to the wording you used and the wording of his response in the "attack" on you? (which might provide plenty of perspective into his character)

I also hadn't heard of Yon before today. I read he was angry that Grisham accused him of something with no proof and to that I ask where is Yon's proof against Grisham's arrest or Bronze Star? Let's hold each to the same standard of proof. It's not up to Grisham to document a medal, it's up to the Army and they apparently thought it was good enough. Yon may really be a saint and Grisham a bad apple... but until there are a few more facts to discuss, we really don't have enough info to make those distinctions, IMO.

Flechero, I don't remember the specific issue or the wording I used, but I can promise you that I wasn't confrontational. The general situation was that Grisham had posted an attack against Yon on his (Grisham's) facebook "fan" page, and it surprised me because I believed Yon from personal experience to be an honorable guy. His reporting is entirely reader supported, and I have donated money to keep him in the field and reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is a former Green Beret and a political libertarian, and his was consistently the most accurate and agenda-free reporting coming out of Iraq and Afghanistan. He may not always have been correct about his analyses (who is, 100% of the time?). For instance, he wrote a lot not too long ago on the differences between the way the Army dustoff and the Air Force Pedros procedures for handling medevac of wounded personnel, and he was critical in that reporting of the Army, and upheld the Air Force Pedros as the better way to do things. In fact our own member E.Marquez was serving as a CSM in Afghanistan RCE, and he and I exchanged several PMs about the subject. I asked him for his opinion in the matter because I knew I'd get a no-BS answer. He was not convinced that Yon was correct. But the point is that Yon wasn't reporting on the civilian politics directing the war; he was concerned for his beloved infantry in a kind of Ernie Pyle way, and he was trying to see that in the fog of war, their best interests did not get overlooked when they were down and dying.

According to Yon, who knew Grisham personally while overseas, Grisham was assigned to an intelligence unit and hardly ever went outside the wire, but he apparently posted constantly on blogs and other sites that he was being crippled by PTSD, etc.

I don't know the man. What I do know is that he posted something on Facebook blasting Michael Yon. I asked him, not really knowing who he was at the time, what was the basis for his attack, because it didn't jibe with what I knew personally about Yon. His response was to accuse me of being one of Yon's sycophants or some such and said something like I had my nose up Yon's behind so far I wouldn't know what's going on. That's not true. I admire Yon for his body of work as a reporter, but I'm not a fanboy. If I were, I would have never have bothered to contact E.Marquez while he was still in Afghanistan to ask if Yon's reporting about medevac was accurate. Anyway, until then I was not really aware that there was a feud brewing between the two men. Of the two of them, I simply find Yon's description of events more believable. That's all.

I'm unaware of charges that he sold out anyone in SF. I don't "know" him well, other than having exchanged a few emails with him, and I could be wrong.

Michael Yon, who is very pro-gun rights, has had a number of interesting articles about this guy Grisham, and it appears that the whole thing was staged by him. Yon reported on this a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, Yon's site has been hacked, so I can't show you links to the pages detailing Grisham's spiraling craziness, but he has threatened on more than one occasion to kill Yon by "fragging" him while Yon was embedded with troops in Iraq. Grisham has an administratively issued Bronze Star, in which the details of the action for which he was awarded it are sketchy and lacking. It looks for all the world like a case of stolen valor. Some of the mil-blogs written by men who've never spent a minute under fire are carrying Grisham's water and attacking Yon on their pages. I know Yon to be a pretty decent guy, so I'm not buying his character assassination by these other writers. I had a Facebook exchange with Grisham in which I asked him what was going on so I could get it first hand from him, since he was posting all of his alleged troubles on Facebook. He responded by attacking me just for asking. Conversely, Yon has always been respectful with me, even if he disagreed with something I said.

I don't have a lot of respect for Grisham.