The stories of Nichole Frye and Gussie Jones, 2 
 of the 16 female soldiers who have died in Iraq, reveal much about a woman's role in the modern military.

When Pfc. Nichole Frye's convoy was attacked with a roadside bomb in Baqouba, Iraq, in February, she became the 15th servicewoman to die in the Iraq war. 

When Capt. Gussie Jones, 41, died in March of a heart attack in the Baghdad hospital where she served as an Army surgical nurse, the conflict in Iraq now has the designation of claiming the lives of more U.S. servicewomen than any hostile [action] since WW II. 

The stories of women like Frye and Jones--what drew them to the military and how they died in that service--reveal much about the role of American military women in Iraq. 

The U.S. military is treating combat stress in Iraq 
with preventive measures as close to the front as possible, a new approach it hopes will reduce stigma and quickly return troops to their posts. 

 vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvv_______________vvvvvvvvvvv

The latest looney-tunes dialogue that seems to be rearing its ugly head once again is the suggestion by some to "bring back the Draft Board -- the current system is unfair -- only the poor are in the military" -- and similar airhead baloney and "unaware hogwash." 
Sir no Sir.  Sir, yes Sir!  whatever to stay on that side, SSSir!    _________________
 
 

Surviving sisters opt out of combat

The two Wisconsin sisters of a female soldier killed this month in Baghdad said that they will not rejoin their Army National Guard units in Iraq. The Pentagon gave Spc. Rachel Witmer, 24, and Sgt. Charity Witmer, 20, the option of finishing their service without returning to their tight knit units in a war zone. 

  ,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,.,...,.,.,.,.,.

Lasting Head Injuries on the Rise In Iraq

BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The soldiers were lifted into the helicopters under a moonless sky, their bandaged heads grossly swollen by trauma, their forms silhouetted by the glow from the row of medical monitors laid out across their bodies, from ankle to neck.
     At the door to the busiest hospital in Iraq, a wiry doctor bent over the worst-looking case, an Army gunner with coarse stitches holding his scalp together and a bolt protruding from the top of his head.
    More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes -- injuries that leave soldiers brain-damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.

U.S. Marines carry a wounded comrade to a waiting helicopter during the battle for the city of Husaybah, Iraq, on April 17. So far in April, more than 900               soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq,         more than twice the number wounded in October,       the previous high.                             NDREW CUTRARO / AP 

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

 

On April 30, President George W. Bush said, "A year ago I [gave a] speech... saying we had accomplished a mission, which was the removal of Saddam Hussein. As a result, there are no longer torture chambers or mass graves or rape rooms in Iraq." 

As he spoke those words, he and millions across the world were aware that U.S. soldiers, military intelligence and American security contractors had been torturing Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.    

My stomach contracts and I feel a deep chill in every pore of my Brown skin when I see the prisoner abuse photos. I know that this is about racism. So why are so many publicly reluctant to say so? Or is it that we can't get our words into print?

Imperial Barbarians
"That's not the way we do things in America," George Bush told an Arab world seething with anger about the photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib. 

MariAnn Curta said she was "freaked out" during much of her son's recently completed nine-month tour of duty in Iraq, where he drove a fuel truck in the Sunni Triangle. 

But when she got the call from a recruiter last weekend warning that her  son, Bill, now on the Army's inactive reserve list, could be headed back to Iraq quickly unless he enlisted in the Illinois National Guard, her emotion changed from fear to rage.

&@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
 

ARMY WIDENS ABUSE PROBE
 As the investigation of prisoner abuses in Iraq shifts to the role of military intelligence, two intelligence soldiers identified in the notorious pictures from the Abu Ghraib detention facility have been ordered to remain in Baghdad as part of the expanding probe, according to witness statements and commanders of the soldiers' reserve units.

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL
   
 

MAY 24, 2004

   American Military Deaths in Iraq

                                                         Total In combat 
   Since 5/1/2003:              662         478 
   Since war began:              801         588 

   Total wounded:           4585 
      Death Total Tops 800
123456789101112131415161718192627282920313233343536373839404142
4344454647484950515253545556575859606162636465666676869707172737475
7677787980818283848586878889100101102103104105106107108109120130140
150160170180190200300400500600700800801802803804805806807808809910

 
Bush Needs a Twelve-Step Program 

Containing no substantial new policy, Monday's speech laying out the administration's plans for the handover in Iraq reaffirms the Bush team's arms-length relationship with reality. In this commentary, Bill Hartung focuses on the president's credibility - or lack of it - and calls for an end to the fatally flawed Bush Doctrine. 

The sense the nation was on a moral mission dated back to the 17th-century Puritans who colonized Massachusetts and whose "Calvinist cast of mind saw America as the redeemer nation" that would build "a city on a hill" for all the world to follow, according to Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger.