A local Navy serviceperson dies, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch is happy to run with the mother’s belief that the Navy caused her death through negligence. The conspiracy theory is a bit stunning in its details, including the charge that the servicewoman was ordered to clean up a bathroom instead of leaving it for the military’s maid service:
Her daughter returned to find sewage backed up in her bathroom at her barracks. The barracks chief provided the sailor and her roommate rubber gloves, scrub brushes and detergent and ordered them to clean it up.
Both became ill, but the roommate recovered.
. . . “Whoever told those girls to clean up that bathroom, they have other people to clean those things up,” she said.
The woman’s death is sad, the grieving understandable. However, thinking the military is negligent for having a servicewoman clean a restroom (raw sewage? You mean the toilets backed up? Heaven forfend someone less than a hazmat team tackle that!) and agitating (for a settlement? An apology from George W. Bush? A chance to be the Cindy Sheehan of sewage?) is not understandable nor does it elicit sympathies of any but a few with an existent anti-military doctrinaires.
Like the editorial staff of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, who runs these questioning stories relatively regularly.
