http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11885967News Analysis
By Dan Schorr
Reading a Letter From the Front: A Soldier in IraqAll Things Considered, July 11, 2007 · A soldier currently serving in Iraq, wrote home about the troubles facing troops there, and the mission overall. Time seems to stretch there, he says, and people are hanging their heads.
TRANSCRIPT
NPR's senior news analyst Daniel Schorr often comments on the war in Iraq and the politics surrounding it. Today he has chosen to read from a letter he was recently given. It was written by a soldier serving in the war.SCHORR: He is a first lieutenant stationed in Kirkuk in Northern Iraq. He has been writing to his family in nothern Virginia in increasingly despairing tones. I have the family's permission to quote him, but not to identify him, for fear of reprisals, so here goes. He reacts to the order adding three months to his one year stay in Iraq ...
Three more months in Iraq is just enough to put people over the top. I don't know why. It could be that twelve months is the threshold that stress overcomes one's strength and fortitude. Or maybe we all mentally prepared ourselves for only 365 days and not a day more.
Either way, I'm not the only one that feels like the anxiety this environment produces is beginning to overcome. You can see it in the way some units conduct themselves on patrols. Some senior leaders have recently been relieved due to actions as little as not enforcing the uniform standards; they have also been releived for actions as great as executing insurgents. Lost soldiers around the base walk around with their heads down. Drug use has gone up. Marriages are failing at an astounding rate. And just recently, a soldier who lived a hundred meters from our living area took his life with a shotgun blast to the head.
- snip -
Three more months to us means much more. It can mean - the guaranteed loss of your spouse to another man, missing your child's birthday again, losing another friend to an IED, without a doubt encountering a full array of life-threatening situations where your life or the life of a soldier or two weighs in the quality of the leaders in charge.
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