Another Bleak Milestone

Barry Paddock, Edgar Sandoval and Adam Lisberg write in the New York Daily News: "The 4,000th American death in Iraq marks a sad new milestone there, New Yorkers said Sunday night - and shows how there seems to be no escape from a war of endless misery.

"'What's the point? What are we fighting for? I think it's a hopeless fight,' said Neil Agaton, 19, of Hell's Kitchen. 'We are just losing people there. We have mothers without sons and young people without siblings.' . . .

"Emma Rebhorn, 23, a college student from Bushwick, Brooklyn, said the 4,000th death should be a wakeup call: 'The angrier and the more disillusioned people get, the faster they'll withdraw the troops.'"

In today's Los Angeles Times, "Times staffers who have covered the war remember some of the men and women who have lost their lives there. A Marine photographed reading a letter from home. A staff sergeant who signed his e-mails 'Combat Journalist.' A 20-year-old from Culver City who joked that Tupac Shakur was alive and lying low in Fallouja. A major who believed in leading from the front, sharing the risks."

And Michael Massing writes in the New York Review of Books about his visit to Fort Drum, N.Y., in an attempt to find out who today's soldier's really are and what led them to volunteer.

"There are some 17,000 soldiers based at Drum (four thousand of whom are currently deployed in Iraq) . . . Among the first I approached was Jason Thomas Adams, a slender young man dressed in a cook's white uniform. A twenty-five-year-old private from Brooklyn, Adams had joined the Army only nine months earlier. He had never really expected to, he told me--he'd wanted to be a police officer. After graduating from high school, he had enrolled in the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. To help pay the tuition, he worked at two jobs--Paragon Sports and a restaurant on Second Avenue--but quickly went into debt.

"Meanwhile, he got married, his wife got pregnant, and he had no health care. From a brother in the military, he had learned of the Army's many benefits, and, visiting a recruiter, he heard about Tricare, the military's generous health plan. He also learned that the Army would repay his education loans. And so he signed up. When I asked about September 11 and service to the country, he said flatly that it had had nothing to do with his decision. . . .

"Over and over, I heard soldiers talk about being hard-pressed to pay the rent, of having a child and being without health care, of yearning to escape a depressing town or oppressive family, of wanting to get out and see the world."

The Public Detachment

The USA Today editorial board writes: "Never has most of the country been so spared the personal suffering of so long a conflict. . . .

"The Iraq war just passed the five-year mark, and while every life saved is a blessing, the public's detachment is not. For many, the war seems abstract even as Americans are fighting and dying, some in their fourth, fifth or sixth combat tour. Because there is no draft, thousands continue to risk their lives after their individual military commitments are up, blocked from leaving the military by controversial 'stop loss' orders. But, except for the families and friends touched by a soldier's sacrifice, life at home is almost normal.

"That feels somehow wrong. So reporters ritually ask leaders why the broad mass of Americans have not been asked to sacrifice. Leaders repeatedly fumble the question. In a PBS interview in January 2007, President Bush construed it as a suggestion that he should raise taxes, which made it easy to say no. Besides, he said, Americans 'sacrifice their peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.'

"In an interview with ABC this month, Vice President Cheney interpreted the question as a suggestion to revive the draft, which made it easy for him to say no. Besides, he said, the country has already sacrificed by spending enormous amounts of money in Iraq.