'Am I Next?'--Question Haunts the Members Of a Casualty-Depleted Platoon

This is so so sombering.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2005/06/19/AR2005061900928.html

> 'Am I Next?'
> The Question Haunts the Members Of a Casualty-Depleted Platoon
>
> By Ann Scott Tyson
> Washington Post Staff Writer
> Monday, June 20, 2005; C01

>
> .......Hayes drops down and cradles Miller's head in his lap, while Dermer rips open a pressure dressing and places it on the neck wound. Each man grabs one of Miller's hands and feels for a pulse. They still haven't found one when medic Spec. Jaymie Holschlag pulls open the back door of the M-113 and rushes, breathless, to Miller's side.
...............
>
> "Doc," Hayes repeats, louder. "He's gone!"
>
> It is 10:18 a.m. on April 12, and John Wayne Miller is no more.
>
> In the frenzy to save Miller, no one was thinking about why the war had snatched away the gangly 21-year-old Wal-Mart stocker from West Burlington, Iowa. Only later, as darkness falls and details of the day's horrors ricochet through their camp, do that question and others begin to haunt Hayes and his tightknit Iowa platoon. With a fifth of its soldiers killed or wounded, the platoon is reeling from the trauma of repeated loss, facing a constant threat from bombs and gunfire on Ramadi's streets, or mortar strikes on their base. They are angry, anxious, wracked by guilt -- one soldier suffers from combat stress so acute that he is unable to go on missions, and stays behind camp walls...........

I read articles like this one and I keep asking myself "What the hell are we doing sending 19- and 21-year-olds over there to die??". And then I remember.

The government and military officials who created this situation and refuse to withdraw are traitors, IMO. :mad: