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While the War Party cheerfully celebrates the holiday season attending galas and fundraisers, the forgotten wounded deal with the prospects of a New Year very different from the last they celebrated.
A Soldier’s Return
Since the war started, more than 2,300 American soldiers in Iraq have been hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs. But as the insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming a hallmark of this war.
Sgt. Jeremy Feldbusch, a fit, driven, highly capable Army Ranger, left home in February knowing the risks of combat. Two months later, he came home blind.
A growing number of young men and women are returning from Iraq and trying to resume lives that were interrupted by war and then minced by injury. Sergeant Feldbusch, a moody 24-year-old, is one of them, back in a little town in western Pennsylvania, in a little house overlooking trees and snow-blanketed hills he cannot see.
During the two months Jeremy Feldbusch spent recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, his parents lived at his bedside. Charlene Feldbusch remembers one day seeing a young female soldier crawling past her in the corridor with no legs and her 3-year-old son trailing behind…
Traditional Catholic Reflections & Reports has prominently run Justin Raimondo’s article, Pope John Paul II: Man of the Year.
In their link, they refer to Antiwar.com as Website of the Year (you must scroll down just a little).
Thank you, TCRNews!
Kudos to The Army Times:
Their Photos Tell the Story, by Jimmy Breslin
The Army Times, a civilian newspaper that is sold mainly on military bases and thus reaches the prime wartime audience, uses eight pages of its year-end review, out now, to run photos of all those who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan…
In introducing the pictures, under the headline “Faces of the Fallen,” the Army Times said: “More than 500 service members died in operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom in 2003, a group that represents the full, rich face of American diversity.
“They grew up in big cities like Chicago and New York and small towns like Layton, Utah, and Cross Lanes, West Virginia. Ten were women, the youngest six 18-year-olds barely out of high school. The oldest, Army Sgt. Floyd G. Nightman Jr., was 55.
The chilling photos run at a time when the government tries to describe the war as a civic venture, and nearly all of the news industry doesn’t know how to object. This probably is the worst failure to inform the public that we have seen…
And the dead are brought back here almost furtively. There are no ceremonies or pictures of caskets at Dover, Del., air base, where the dead are brought. “You don’t want to upset the families,” George Bush said. That the people might be slightly disturbed already by the death doesn’t seem to register. The wounded are flown into Washington at night. There are 5,000 of them and for a long time you never heard of soldiers who have no arms and legs…
…who doesn’t march to the beat of the Pentagon’s drummer. It is alarming enough that much of the media have voluntarily fallen into lockstep with the Administration, but not content with that, they now want to silence the remainder who refuse to compromise their ethics to churn out propaganda.
“When George Bush’s Pentagon doesn’t like what a reporter writes, it attempts a preemptive strike. In the case of Tom Ricks, military reporter for the Washington Post, the Pentagon took the attack right to the heart of the enemy. Defense Department spokesman Larry DiRita first sent a letter of complaint to the Post; then he met with the paper’s top editors to press his points.
“Ricks is one of the most senior defense reporters in the country. He covered military affairs for the Wall Street Journal for 17 years and has been doing the same for the Post since 1999. He’s written two books about the military, one about the Marines and a novel about the US intervention in Afghanistan, published four months before the United States sent in troops.
“In his more than two decades covering the military, Ricks has developed many sources, from brass to grunts. This, according to the current Pentagon, is a problem…”
see: Pentagon to Washington Post Reporter Ricks
As if the religious cauldron wasn’t already simmering in Iraq, add Bible Belt Missionaries Set Out on a ‘War for Souls’
American Christian missionaries have declared a “war for souls” in Iraq, telling supporters that the formal end of the US-led occupation next June will close an historic “window of opportunity”… Organising in secrecy, and emphasising their humanitarian aid work, Christian groups are pouring into the country, which is 97 per cent Muslim, bearing Arabic Bibles, videos and religious tracts designed to “save” Muslims from their “false” religion …
The missionaries are mainly evangelicals who reject talk of Muslims and Christians worshipping the same God … Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham and the head of Samaritan’s Purse, a big donor to Iraq, has described Islam as a “very evil and wicked religion”…
The missionaries pose a dilemma for President George W Bush. He has reached out to Muslims since September 11, shrugging off criticism from evangelicals to describe Islam as “peaceful”. But Christian conservatives are also a key Bush constituency: Franklin Graham delivered the invocation prayer at his presidential inauguration.
Jon Hanna, an evangelical from Ohio who has recently returned from Iraq, applied for a new passport to travel there, describing himself as a humanitarian worker. “I was worried the US authorities might try to stop us, might be worried we were going to start a riot with our Bibles. He describes Islam as “false” … In Baghdad last month Mr Hanna met two other American missionary teams. One, from Indiana, had shipped in 1.3 million Christian tracts. “A US passport is all you need to get in, until the new Iraqi government takes over. What we thought was a two-year window, originally, has narrowed down to a six month window,” said Mr Hanna …
