A Drunken Night in Iraq, a Soldier Left Behind-Woman Is Run Over, Abandoned by a Sergeant

The sun had not yet risen in Taji. A young Army soldier lay alone in the dirt. She was alive, but barely. Her ribs had been crushed; her spleen, ruptured. Her right side was marked by the angular tread of a tire.

Pfc. Hannah Gunterman McKinney was 20 years old, the brown-eyed mother of a toddler son, when she was spotted in the headlights of a passing Humvee on a perimeter road at one of the largest U.S. military camps in Iraq.

Thirteen hours later, in Redlands, Calif., Barbie and Matt Heavrin, who had three children in the military, learned they had lost their elder daughter to "injuries suffered when she was struck by a vehicle," as the Army first described it.

But there was more to the story. For the Heavrins, the events of Sept. 4, 2006, inside the wire of Camp Taji emerged bit by bit. McKinney's last hours, they would learn, involved alcohol, sex and a decorated reservist who was responsible for looking out for junior enlisted soldiers such as their daughter.

Her case would become one in a litany of noncombat deaths in Iraq, which number more than 700, from crashes, suicides, illnesses and accidents that sometimes reveal messy truths about life in the war zone.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010304434.html?hpid=topnews

:cry:

We are rapidly dehumanizing.

:cry:

All we need is a Trigger Event and there is literally no bottom limit to the atrocities we are capable of visiting on ourselves and others.