What we've really lost in this indefensible war by Jimmy Breslin

[coeur_de_lion]

http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nybres243940920aug24,0,700279.column
<<snip>>
There were four Marines and an Army soldier killed in Iraq in one 24-hour period over the weekend. George Bush, who does not like people who go to war, probably will say that they are not dead. As of Aug. 20, we list 952 of our troops killed in fighting. That is the Defense Department figure. When the figure goes over 1,000, that can be devastating in an election.

But the figure of 1,000, so easily remembered, already has been reached. That was on July 7, when a rocket-propelled grenade killed Pfc. Samuel Bowen of Cleveland. The people keeping track at the Army Times newspaper, which has given the best, and often the only, coverage of the war, made Bowen the 1,000th. The Army Times, with no election to effect, properly includes deaths in Afghanistan.

The names of the dead in Iraq over the weekend have not been released yet, except for Army Pfc. Kevin A. Cuming, 22, of White Plains. And so you sat yesterday with all these Department of Defense death notices for the last weeks covering the desk and you glanced at them, with the ages of the dead reaching up from the paper to grab your throat. Now and then you called one of their homes to get a small idea of what they were like when they lived, and what we have lost in a war that now pleases only the mentally unbalanced.

Printing as many names and as often as possible is a gloomy task. These are the deaths that the president and his people try to sneak past the country. The dead were brave men. The president is craven. He buries the war, and the news reporters, indolent and in fear of authority, follow like cattle going into pens. For so long, the public believed the news it was given. Saddam Hussein was going to blow us up with an atom bomb! The Muslims of Iraq love us!
<<snip>>

[markses]

1. Devastating

Pfc. Raymond J. Faulstich Jr., 89th Transportation Company, 6th Transportation Battalion, 7th Transportation Group, Fort Eustis, Va. Died Aug. 5 in Najaf when enemy using small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades attacked his convoy. Home, Leonardtown, Md.

"He had a problem with drugs and alcohol and went one place to the other," his mother, Linda, was saying last night. "Then he met a girl he loved. Her family said she couldn't see him unless he straightened out. He did. For her love. He joined the Army, and they married.

"When the two Army men came to the house to tell us, I was inside cleaning. I started to scream. 'Oh, my God! My son is dead!' He had his rosary beads in his pocket when he was killed. His wife, Crystal, had been out, and when she came over and saw the crowd in the yard she thought he was home on his two-week leave that he was supposed to be on. She's 19. She was going to go to college but she just can't do it now.

"My son was a beautiful young man. Everybody speaks about his smile. He had such a beautiful smile. My husband's smile. I say to my husband, 'Could you please smile so I can see my son's face?'"

[coeur_de_lion]

5. All of these young people

before Iraq, had families and friends who loved them, beautiful smiles, love for their country, a bright future.

We have to remember the widowed wife who cries herself to sleep every night. The child who will grow up fatherless. The mother who will weep for her child every mother's day.

We have to remember them, because Bush damn sure won't.

[enough]

2. Read the whole article

to understand why they need to keep the SMEAR MACHINE going.

This is what they are trying to hide.


from my state:

snip>

First Lt. Neil Anthony Santoriello, 24, of 1st Battalion, 34th Armor, 1st Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, Fort Riley, Kan. Died on Aug. 13 in Khalidiyah when improvised explosive device detonated near his mounted reconnaissance patrol vehicle. Home, Verrona, Pa.

"He lived for oatmeal cookies," his sister, Amy, said yesterday. "He was an Eagle Scout. He took children hiking, swimming. He went to Penn Hills High School and Dickinson College. What did he do after college? He went right into the Army. He had no time in between. He's only 24."

snip>

[coeur_de_lion]

4. I sometimes think that * is so out of touch with reality that he

thinks those boys are like little green plastic army men, or cardboard cutout figures. I've never heard him say one single thing that would tell me that he understands the pain he is inflicting on these men (and women) and their families.

He is beyond insensitive.

[gratuitous]

6. Not the little green army men

Stupidhead thinks of them, if he thinks of them at all, as the little blocks on the Risk board. Not even human. They don't get tired, don't need supplies, don't need R&R, can stay in the field (or on the board) indefinitely. Always ready to go at the roll of the dice, and if you lose, well, there's always more in the box.

[JVS]

7. I was at Neil's funeral yesterday

we used to go to Sunday school together and I know his family well. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen. The pastor just said outright that there was nothing anyone could say to a bride of 22 months or parents who had raised their son for so long and seen him sent off never to reappear that could make them feel any better.

[H2O Man]

3. It breaks your heart to read these things.

For the rest of these peoples' lives, they will have an unbearable pain and untold suffering, and for what? In whatever little way we can, we need to concentrate on bringing this issue to the table of discussions on the November election.