Monday, March 05, 2007

Casualties of War

Minstrel Boy has a chilling photo and a number of excellent posts up at his place. He writes with passion and experience bringing to the discussion a point of view that only someone who has lost someone in Iraq can express. Caution: Graphic Image.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope, maybe you're too young to remember the government obsession with the enemy body counts during the Vietnam War, exaggerated to make the "tradeoff" - the bang we were getting for our buck of American casualties - seem more palatable.

This time around, if the government is counting dead Iraqis, they're not publishing. Apparently, that was the only lesson Busho learned from Vietnam.

HopeSpringsATurtle said...

Op, you are about five minutes older than me and I do remember the 'body counts'. Inflating the numbers was part of the McNamara strategy to win the hearts and minds of the American people; convince people what a noble, just war Vietnam was. My uncle was there, and husband's dad. Neither one of them discuss their experiences, but I know they are both damaged by them. My grandfather was on The USS California when it was bombed at Pearl Harbor, my mom retired after 20 years in the Navy, my dad was in Korea. Since WWII the slide downhill from "a just cause" has been apparent, destructive and deadly. Eisenhower warned us of the "military, industrial complex" and when you watch his final address, it is so apparent that he saw the MIC taking hold and it frightened him. He was frightened for an America that he saw slipping away, as we all do now. I put all my energy into assisting in anyway I can to help topple the BushCo house of cards and restore some semblance of an America I see more and more as maybe never existing to begin with.