17 deaths, countless fears (Fort Carson, CO soldiers in Iraq all since 5/)

http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36~11676~1595882,00.html

Spec. Travis Rollins thought he had a foolproof way to insulate himself from the fear and raw emotions that come from war and death as a GI in Iraq: He shut out all news of casualties.
In his mind, that was a way to block "that fear that this (death) is going to be a family member or this is going to be a friend," said Rollins, safely back from his tour.

But this week, his plan backfired. Rollins' best friend, Spec. Ronald Dean Allen, was killed in an accident along a narrow road in Iraq after getting out of his vehicle to change a flat tire.

Allen was the 17th soldier from Fort Carson to die in Iraq since being deployed. The 16 men and one woman have all died since May 1, the day President Bush declared that major combat operations of the war were over.

--snip--

Phones ring nonstop throughout the base. Frantic mothers, wives, siblings call anyone they can - chaplains, public affairs officers, family support group members - anyone who will answer the phone. They are trying to find anyone who can let them know who is the latest victim, Bixler said.

"A death seems like a daily occurrence to us," Bixler said. "...I think for people who aren't there (in Iraq), it is going to feel more out of control, so you fill in the blanks with all of your anxiety."

and so very hard to read............ sigh.........

So sad.

But it was the first news we've had about casualties in some time.

It is out of control. Fort Carson used to be considered a prime duty assignment. This war and it is a war rather than "winning the peace," has completely changed the perspective on serving with the armed forces. The lack of righteousness and justification makes the deaths seem all that more meaningless.

I disagree with people on the left who say we can't "bring em home" because it's not that simple. This is a misconception. The first false assumption is that we know better than the Iraqis how their country should be run. This is a combination of chauvinism and greed. The second rationalization is that we brought the diastrous situation there about therefore we are responsible to fix it. This avoids the obvious fact that things can't get better while we are there. We are the problem. We can't fix it. Only leaving will offer the opportunity to fix it. The enormous sacrifices made so far are irrelevant. Past losses cannot justify future losses. The Iraqi people are intelligent and have great resources. They are more than capable of opening their country to world and developing it without our constant interference and attacks. There may be a civil war when we leave for a while until power is consolidated. The current civil war will go on for as long as we are there.

Wounded, Weary And Disappeared

http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/8736

This article says that we have so many wounded that they're putting them in hotels.

snip...

"The wounded are much too real; telling their stories would be too much of a bummer for television's news programmers," says Norman Solomon, media critic and co-author of Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. "Dead people don't linger like wounded people do. Dead people's names can be posted on a television honor role, but the networks and cable news channels won't clog up their air time with the names and pictures of hundreds and hundreds of wounded soldiers."

snip...

"Since the war has started, I can't give you an exact number because that's classified information, but I can say to you over 4,000 have stayed here at Andrews," he said. "And that number doubles when you count the people that come here to Andrews, and then we send them to other places like Walter Reed and Bethesda..."

Some journalists also dispute the Pentagon's official count. Julian Borger of The Guardian claims "unofficial figures are in the thousands." Central Command in Qatar talked of 926 wounded, but "that too is understated," Borger maintains. And in fact, a mid-August report in The Salt Lake City Tribune claims that Central Command has acknowledged 1,007 U.S. wounded. (The Pentagon did not respond to inquiries.)

snip...

John Stauber, author of the recently released book The Weapons of Mass Deception, says the war was sold on television as a sanitized war with minimal U.S. casualties -- which was exactly what the Bush administration tried to engineer. "Showing wounded soldiers and interviewing their families could be disastrous PR for Bush's war," he says. "I suspect the administration is doing all it can to prevent such stories unless they are stage managed feel-good events like Saving Private Lynch."

their elected representatives and DEMAND that our troops come home NOW...talking to those "chaplains, public affairs officers, family support group members" won't change the reality of the predicament that they now find themselves in...but some effort toward stopping the carnage might make a difference...it's sad that they didn't realize this BEFORE the war started, so they wouldn't have shouted down the pro-peace people and joined us instead....

are having any political impact in that bastion of right wing conservatism, Colorado Springs?


Nah....

got in an accident changing a tire. Ah.....yeah......right!