The first thousand (dead soldiers) is always the hardest.......

http://www.icasualties.org/oif/default.aspx

statistics. that's all the dead are now. numbers on the website of the dept. of defense. no faces. names, yes, but they look like mere statistics. someone is keeping track of the numbers. the sum of the dead, injured, missing, captured, in two nations, far away.

so far as of today: 814 dead u.s. soldiers in iraq. and in afghanistan, 124 more. keeping track, that's 938 dead american soldiers as of today. we're pushing the big impressive number 1,000 rapidly. only about 60 more dead soldiers to go.

surely somewhere there is a website counting the crippled u.s. soldiers, but i couldn't find it. there are about 2,000 of them, blinded, shattered, broken, suffering, and lost in the system. you'd hardly know it though.

and then, the unmentionable dead. the innocents. sure, we approximate the sum of enemy combatants who we've killed. but who are they really? we call them insurgents, rebels, dead enders, but they are mostly just men fighting for their freedom. they don't even have uniforms like us. some estimates go as high as 30,000 dead innocents, men, women and children, in iraq alone.
are we avenged for 9-11 yet?

and remember, these people had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH 9-11.

i don't know what will happen when we reach the 1,000 dead soldier mark in a few months. i suppose it will be remarked on, ad infinitum for a few days, then, stay the course again.

when we talk of past wars, we always include the numbers. the grim statistics, which of course are always published by the victors.
vietnam, 58,000 dead american soldiers. 2 million dead innocents.

anyone can look up the numbers to each war and read the cold statistics, and it's easy to forget that each number is a tale of grief, long forgotten.

the neoconazis say that we will surely be there for at least another decade. iraq is only the beginning according to the demon rumsfeld.
only the beginning. i believe him. he's really good at math.