Encore

The New York Times reports on multiple tours to Iraq for some soldiers:

Earlier this year, as Sgt. Alexander Garcia's plane took off for home after his tense year of duty in Iraq, he remembered watching the receding desert sand and thinking, I will never see this place again.

Never lasted about 10 months for Sergeant Garcia, a cavalry scout with the First Armored Division who finished his first stint in Iraq in March and is now preparing to return...

No one is feeling normal anymore at Fort Riley and other bases across the country, where military life is undergoing a radical change. They are stoic here, and many point out, as Sergeant Garcia does, that they signed up for this.

Still, in decades past, troops had gotten used to a predictable rhythm to their deployments. Even during Desert Storm and Vietnam, most soldiers could expect to take just one trip into harm's way.

But with the military stretched thin in Iraq and in Afghanistan, some soldiers and marines are being sent to war zones repeatedly, for longer stretches in some cases, and with far less time at home between deployments than they say they have ever experienced before...

This frenzied pace is swiftly becoming the norm. Nearly a third of the 950,000 people from all branches of the armed forces who have been sent to Iraq or Afghanistan since those conflicts began have already been sent a second time. Part-time soldiers - Army national guardsmen and reservists - who often have handled support roles, not frontline combat roles, are slightly more likely to have served more than one deployment to the conflict zones than regular Army members.

And, of the nearly 1,300 troops who have died in Iraq since the war began, more than 100 of them were on second tours...

Among some of the soldiers themselves, the thought of returning to Iraq carries one puzzling quality: Unlike so many parts of life, in which the second try at anything feels easier than the first, these soldiers say that heading to Iraq is actually more overwhelming the second time around.

"The first time, I didn't know anything," Sergeant Garcia said. "But this time I know what I'm getting into, so it's harder. You know what you're going to do. You know how bad you're going to be feeling."

And while these soldiers will experience the closest thing to hell on earth for a second time, Donald Rumsfeld can't be bothered to sign his name to letters of condolence that are sent to the families of soldiers slain in combat. But that's ok--there are some indications that the dauphin himself has let the signature machine take care of that trifling detail.

However, this IS allowing some to suggest a bit more forcefully that Rummy should be pink slipped--as if the whole sorry, piss poor, woefully unplanned exercise in Iraq isn't reason enough to give the whole Bush team their walking papers. As for me, at this point why not let Rummy stick around. I want to watch him squirm when the shit REALLY hits the fan, given how he and his boss did everything in their power to ensure it would.