Jason Whong: Renaissance Man-in-Training

If someone sends you the link to the Jessie Macbeth video, kindly inform them that the video is anti-government propaganda, likely laced with exaggerations and outright lies.

I ran into the video on Metafilter, and I knew something was wrong with it. The more I listened, the more outrageous his claims became:

• He says he personally has killed about 200 innocent civilians at close range
• He describes a Rangers infiltration of a mosque. When women and children pray, the Rangers ambush them and hang their mutilated corpses inside the mosque. Then they write anti-Allah graffiti on the walls.
• He says the Rangers interrogated parents by shooting their children one-by-one if they didn’t answer correctly.
• He says he is haunted by the memories of seeing a woman, marked by the blood of her own child, pleading for her life with three children in her arms before he kills them all “because he had to.”

Already lots of military blog sites are going to town on this guy for claiming to be a Ranger when he isn’t wearing a proper ranger uniform. I don’t feel qualified to comment on the completeness of his uniform, so I will refrain. I will, however, note some of the innaccuracies I have noticed in his stories at several places.

What’s in a name

The video says he is Jessie Macbeth. He’s easier to find under the name Jesse MacBeth or Jesse Macbeth.

The question of time

The video says Macbeth spent 16 months in Iraq with the Rangers.

MacBeth told the Eastern Arizona Courier in November of 2003 that he “returned to the states two-and-a-half months ago after sustaining an injury in his back.” That puts him back in America about 6 months after hostilities began in Iraq.

The question of medals and wounding

Macbeth told SocialistAlternative.org a few things:

What medals did you get in Iraq?
I got a lot. I got a purple heart. Half of them, I don’t remember. I got five or six medals just for landing. I got a bronze star.

What injuries did you get?
I got stabbed many times. I got shrapnel in my knee. I got shot in the back.

Stabbed many times? Um. Wow. Maybe there are insurgents that carry knives or bayonets, but, umm. That’s unusual.

But he didn’t say any of this to the Eastern Arizona Courier in November, nor to the ASU State Press in April of 2004, which notes he came back to “recover from a back injury.”

The question of service

Macbeth tells SocialistAlternative.org that he was in the Third Ranger Battalion.

Now here’s the nugget - the 3rd Ranger battalion eventually became the 3d Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment - in 1986… but it doesn’t appear they went to Iraq at all.< (I could be very wrong on this one - but everything I read about the unit talks about the invasion of Panama... nothing much about OIF. But I have not had the time to investigate this further. update: They were there.