While the focus has been mostly on Iraq, with the tragic loss of a second helicopter in Afghanistan and the year barely half over, we have already exceeded the casualty count for the entire previous year of 2004. In fact, it's the highest death toll of any year in...
Recruitment Goals
For the past couple of years, we have repeatedly heard spokesmen from the National Guard and the reserve aver that they were continuing to meet their basic recruitment goals within a few percentage points. It never ceased to amaze me that there were so many who would...
Hostile Territory?
There is much speculation floating around about the tragic crash of the British C-130 Hercules yesterday which occurred barely twenty miles northwest of Baghdad. While the BBC reports in Ten feared dead in Hercules crash that "...wreckage from the C-130 plane, which...
1200 US Dead
It seems such a short while, one month ago today exactly, when I posted that 1100 US troops had died in Iraq, and at the time it seemed such a short while before that 1000 troops had died. Now we have reached 1200. Such a tragic waste of lives to justify a mistaken...
Fallujah attack plans stolen?
Buried down toward the bottom of this news roundup of the current situation in Iraq is this tiny but devastating blurb: An Iraqi company commander who had received a full battle briefing on the expected Falluja assault has deserted a military base where U.S. and Iraqi...
Spiraling into Iraq
From Dahr Jamail's Iraq Dispatches, Spiraling into Occupied Iraq Humvees and Bradley fighting vehicles are perched along the road, with their weapons aimed directly at us and other cars as we pass...this is occupied Iraq. We drive perilously close to a huge Bradley...
Dying for a Mistake
Today's dedication ceremony and reenactment in Balaclava, Ukraine, in honor of the valiant charge by British cavalry during the Crimean War brings to mind once again Alfred, Lord Tennyson's stirring poem of heroic duty. "The Charge of the Light Brigade" has...
Failure to secure…
In light of today's horrendous news that 380 tons (760,000 pounds) of high explosives seem to have been "mislaid" in the aftermath of the war in 2003, I was reminded of a blog entry I posted in January 2004 which dealt with a similar theft, only then it was about...
1100
Seems such a short time ago that we had reached 1000 soldiers dead in Iraq. Now it's 100 more unnecessary deaths. Casualties in Iraq
“Mother’s Little Helper”
The Rolling Stones 1966 hit, "Mother's Little Helper," was a warning about addiction to Valium, a tranquilizer used by a legion of western women "...to get her through her busy day." Of course, there is no comparison between the relatively placid suburban existence of...
