Our toll in Iraq is now 4*10³

Good God!

 

Let's add another stat ...

Twenty-five American troopers have been killed in the past two weeks, which a writer at Vet Voice calls the most violent two-week period in Iraq since last September.

http://www.vetvoice.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=839

But remember, the surge is working! And there can't possibly be a better way to do this!

 

BT's point about better medical care has merit. Also on point: War is a lot more high-tech, video game-like, not as labor intensive as war was back in the WWII days.

 

At various times in the past few years I've heard Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Jackson and Kevin Whelan of Pundit Review Radio say that more people are killed in a city like Washington or Detroit than in Iraq, so apparently, they don't see a problem with what's going on over there.

 

Not that they give a damn about the gun violence in inner cities either.

 

I recently sat across the kitchen table from a 68-year-old woman in Scottsburg, Indiana. We ate the pot roast she cooked and drank a lot of Bud Light. We spoke for hours about her son, Sergeant Robert Joe Montgomery, Jr., who was 29 years old when he was killed in Iraq on May 22, 2007. Everybody called him Joey. He was a married father of three. He was scared of spiders. He loved Nine Inch Nails. He had worked in a steel mill before he decided to join the Army, because he wanted his kids to grow up in a decent house with pot roast on the kitchen table. I've seen the people who loved him, and the town he's from, and the places he lived, and the graveyard he's buried in.

He was the 3,431st American killed in the war.

Anyone who can dismiss these numbers as insignificant or make light of them is the lowest of the lowest of the low. That's all there is to it.

Look at one face behind those numbers. Then look at another, and another, and another, and multiply that by one thousand.

Or, Chris, you're the father of four. The mother I spoke to was the mother of three, Joey the youngest. So let's imagine your third child dead by the side of the road, in the tall grass, southeast of Baghdad.

Now see if you can keep at it.

 

OK, Mr. Jones, you asked for it ... I got all of them. In one graphic. No joke. (Not my artwork.)

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the people who have died for whatever it is they were sent over there to fight for. (I don't know what it is, and I think the people making the decisions are no clearer on their reasons than I am.)

This is a mosaic of the American troopers who have died in Iraq. If you zoom out, you can see whose faces are shown in the larger mosaic.

http://tinyurl.com/32vlqs

 

If a son or daughter of mine wishes to wear the uniform - then I will honor their decision because its their decision. Are you one of those Canadians who believe that our soldiers are tricked into joining?

Thanks for dragging my kids into the discussion though.

 

dooley - the study I linked to made that very point with exact numbers and ratios of dead to wounded from all the conflicts the US has fought in since the Civil War. I'm guessing nobody bother to read the study because if there's a link to something on media matters - well then that's all there is to say. There's no way Media Matter (or the New York Times for some of you) could ever be wrong.

 

Typical.
Jones makes a valid point, Chris answers with more of his bullshit about Jones being Canadian.

You forget to tell us Chris how the 4,000+ have died to proect our freedom.

 

You're helping drag other people's kids into war, Lynch. What's worse?

 

They're all somebody's kids.

Even the Iraqis, whose deaths we can't be bothered to count.