Kal Korff

World hero, super-intelligent human, and exposer of fakers, Kal Korff (seen on the left) has brought up my name in conversation on a radio interview. Now I confess that I didn’t hear it and all I have is the report from a friend who mentioned it to me. Korff, according to him, said that I was claiming my Iraq service was more important than it was. He suggested that I was called to active duty because the Army didn’t have enough people and I was just filling in.

Well, Duh.

That’s the purpose of the Reserve Component of the miliary (here Reserve Component means both the Army Reserve and the National Guard). We train one weekend a month and two weeks a year to perform in roles to assist the Active Component. For example, the only water purification units in the Army are in the Reserve. Most of the Civil Affairs soldiers are part of the Reserve Component.

What this does is provide a trained reserve (hence the name Reserve Component) for the Army at a fraction of the cost of the Active Component. It calls on those soldiers, both officers and enlisted when it has specialized missions, or the Active Component is stretched thin. Sort of the situation that we have today. The Active Force deployed into lots of arenas with the Reserve Component picking up the slack. At one point a couple of years ago the majority of the Iowa National Guard was either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The other comment, that my role in the war wasn’t as important as I claim it to be, confuses me. I’m not sure what I might have said anywhere in Korff’s hearing that would suggest such a thing. I was on the primary staff of a battalion which had its soldiers stretched from Mosul in the north to Kuwait in the south and from the Iranian border in the east to near Al Fallujah in the west. We preformed our mission to the satisfaction of the brigade commander and many of the soldiers were singled out for special commendation.

I am the only officer in the battalion to engage the enemy, but the gunfight probably resulted in fewer than 150 rounds expended on both sides. The LA police shot up more ammunition trying to subdue two bank robbers than we did in that fight. We did, that is the gunner in my Humvee and I, drive the terrorists from the field, which, of course was all that we needed to do. None of the soldiers with us was injured and we continued out of the kill zone just as training had taught us. None of the other vehicles were engaged.

Or maybe Korff is referring to the article that appeared in Soldier of Fortune about the Easter firefight just north of our battalion area (The Quick Reaction Force about fifteen feet in front of my position fire on an enemy position). Only one of our soldiers was injured. About a half dozen or so of the terrorists were killed and another dozen captured by the Special Forces. A couple of thousand rounds were expended in this fight.

But, again, thousands of other soldiers and Marines in Iraq have been more actively engaged with the enemy than anything I experienced in Iraq. I just don’t know what he means by his suggestion my service wasn’t as important as I have made it out to be.

This is not the first time that Korff and I have tangled. He believes that Roswell can best be explained by a weather balloon (okay a Project Mogul balloon) and to read his book, you’d think the theory was unique to him. Both Robert Todd and Karl Pflock had the idea earlier and I believe that Pflock gives the credit to Todd for originating the idea. Col. William Coleman floated (yeah, pun intended) the idea as early as 1988 (a tip of the hat to Brad Sparks for the clarification).

In his book (which I’m not going to name here because I have already given him enough publicity for his poorly researched and badly flawed work), he takes me to task for misleading the reading public and attacks my research abilities... Okay again, I believed Frank Kaufmann, but then so did others. Korff goes after my reporting on Air Force Brigadier General Arthur Exon in a way that suggests Korff’s claims of a superior intellect might be overblown. Greg Sandow, a somewhat disinterested third party reported on this on UFO UpDates, which can be accessed at:

www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/1997/may/m28-007.shtml.

But enough of this. My point is only to suggest that Korff’s attack might be more sour grapes than anything. He claims to be a captain in some organization that no one has ever heard of and complains about my service in the United States Army, an organization that can be found by searching the web. It is real and I can prove it. (As just a single example, here I am on the road from Kuwait to Baghdad.)

Those who are interested in more Kal Korff might want to take a look at Paul Kimball’s blog at www.redstarfilms.blogspot.com so they can read about his assault on Kimball.

With luck, this will be the last I have to say on the subject of Kal Korff. And yes, I really hold a commission in a real live military organization. I didn’t have to invent one to call myself captain (which, for those of you keeping score at home, no longer applies. I have been promoted).