« This is incredibly disturbing and sad’ »:
‘Out here on the farthest reaches of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, they are calling it “The Silent War,” the one where Marines are mortared and maimed, bombed and blown up, ambushed and killed, and almost nobody but them and their families know about it. Out here on the western perimeter, a few hundred yards from the Syrian border, a battalion of Marines, spearheaded by the embattled Lima Company, has been fighting for nearly two months to forge stability on a piece of territory that the Army’s 82nd Airborne carved out before them, also in relative anonymity. They don’t make the headlines, not like those in Fallujah or Baghdad, but they still bleed and die, still mourn the loss of their comrades.
…
Gannon was surprised when he saw the heavy casualty reports from the 82nd Airborne, which had been there before the Marines. “I was, like, `Whoa, why haven’t we been reading about this?’” he said while sitting in the small office that is his command center. “What’s been going on here? Have they been having some kind of silent war? And, sure enough, they had been.”
…
“We’ve had more contact here in a week than we did in the entire first phase of the war,” said Lt. Isaac Moore of Wasilla, Alaska, who fought with Lima last year and now is with Weapons Company. Cpl. Matt Nale, 32, of Seattle, said he has seen it all, from mines to bombs to small-arms fire. “I don’t think there’s a day that we’ve been out that we haven’t been hit,” he said. Most of the injuries have been relatively minor. Fewer than 10 Marines have been taken out of commission. “Still,” said Navy Corpsman Justin Purviance of Denver, “if we keep getting wounded at the rate we’re going, one of every three men in the unit will be injured before we get out of here.”’
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
33% casualty rates possible? And you gotta die and be sent home silently and anonymously in an aluminum tube before us fat lazy bastards back home even hear your name?
And this in a quiet corner of the Imperial Province of Iraq. What’s happening elsewhere?
Meanwhile, the Boy Emperor ‘acknowledged that recent images from Iraq were alarming. “Look, nobody likes to see dead people on their television screens,” he said. “I don’t. It’s a tough time for the American people to see that. It’s gut-wrenching.”’
I don’t care if you don’t like to see ‘em, you Texas Twit, YOU ordered their deaths and injuries and YOU should have the courage to look at each and every one of them and finally and fully understand the consequences of your extremist political agenda. Your gut should be wrenched … each and every single minute of every day that you don’t clean up this mess you and your ‘advisors’ created.
And you need to fully and completely, without the smarmy, unapologetic frat-bastard-ness, explain to Lima Company why you lied and condemned them to taking 33% casualties in Husaybah.
