Among other questions I asked the Col. was 'have you ever been shot at?' The Col. was amused and said no, but that Maj. Dickinson had safely brought a pot-chopper down after mechanical problems made him do a forced landing. For that, the Major received a medal. Looks like Major Dickinson wasn't so lucky this time as it appears to us that irritated patriotic domestic pot growers decided they'd had enough of Guard terrorism and privacy violations and took aim to shoot down the chopper as the article below (see highlighted text) clearly implies.

If you have ever seen the sickening display of money wasted every year by the National Guard as they fly at tree-top level scaring cows and horses and -- in clear violation of the Forth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and in defiance of the Posse Comitatus Act -- snooping on our nation's own citizens while spending upwards of three thousand dollars an hour for fuel alone to run those Hueys and Blackhawks just to bag a few pounds of wet buds they claim are worth millions so that other guardsmen on the ground can fill their pockets and smoke or sell the weed themselves, then you might not be so shocked that someone might exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms against any wicked intruder in defense of the liberties declared sacrosanct by our own Declaration of Independence.

As our original interview with Moore pointed out, the cost at that time to fly just one Blackhawk was twenty-seven-hundred-dollars per hour just for fuel and we note that fuel prices have doubled since then.

Other 'interdiction efforts' by the Guard in Baxter County [see It's Our $$$$] proved to cost an estimated $90,000 to seize a pot crop with a calculated street value of $12,000 max, while the 'brick marijuana' most commonly found in Arkansas and most other states comes in from Mexico by the ton. Evidence, perhaps, of how well NAFTA is working...

The cash outflow from this smuggled dope is truly immense and we citizens are biting the bullet twice, wasting billions on ineffective interdiction while missing out on the windfall tax revenues to be gleaned by regulating the sale and  consumption of this plant like alcohol or tobacco, but still these weekend warriors soldier on, complying with corrupt orders to unleash useless and detrimental campaigns of harassment, pragmatically proving that the United States is a country of contradictions and vast waste with pot eradication programs being the perfect example thereof.

We won't go into if pot is bad or good but we will say these military programs are stupid, wasteful, corrupted and pointless and no, we don't feel sorry for the pilots if they got hurt.

As a former navy man and six year member of the naval reserves, I have a great fondness for the military as an institution and great respect for men and women who serve the legitimate Constitutionally compliant needs of our nation but I have no more patience with these weekend warrior yo-yo's who get their kicks at our civic expense playing Wyatt Earp. As time goes on, it is likely the Guard will spend a few billion dollars more on 'stealth' gear to make their choppers invisible. Still, at tree top level, one might say they are pretty easy targets.  ~~~