It’s not always the most uplifting experience, but I highly recommend adding the New York Times’ Baghdad Bureau to your daily reading. It typically never updates more than twice a day, and the accounts are always impactful. Take for example, this scene:
That afternoon, outside the trauma ward of Mosul’s Combat Support Hospital, the soldiers of K Troop waited anxiously for word about the comrades they had rushed from the Zanjili outpost.
When the news came, it was bad, but not as bad as some feared. Of the eight soldiers who had suffered gunshot wounds one, Specialist Shea, had died within seconds. “I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what happened,” Sergeant Neuzil said. “I think he was killed instantly.”
Medics managed to keep the seven others alive long enough to reach surgery at the hospital. There a second soldier, Sgt. Jose Regalado, 23, of Los Angeles, died from his wounds. In the chaos at the outpost, no one had been sure how to help Sergeant Regalado. Shot in the torso, he was not in good shape, but he was not bleeding badly, either.
Too often we tend to discuss the War in Iraq from a distance, but it’s worthwhile to take a step back and consider how utterly dehumanizing it is that the phrase “not as bad as some feared,” isn’t used to describe damage to a car or the number of jobs shed, but rather in reference to the death of two men under the age of 23.
