More Costs of War

You've probably seen the headlines today about the missile attack on a helicopter north of Baghdad today, which killed eleven individuals. But Cursor also noted two Washington Post stories dealing with day-to-day realities equally vicious:

In this one, Ann Scott Tyson recounts the horror of survivor's guilt when she realizes that a Humvee which struck an IED had been the one she was traveling in just ten minutes previously. And in this story Steve Fainaru writes about an individual NCO in Mosul who's taken his street-gang upbringing (in Puerto Rico and Brooklyn) and applied it to countering the insurgency. Neither is particularly uplifting--instead, both underscore the utter lost cause that is Mesopotamia.

Finally, Blogger was gone for the last couple of hours--and their own status pages indicates additional down time in not quite ten minutes. Soooo.....I'll cut this post short...hopefully this isn't an indication of a return to awful that was the norm a couple of weeks ago...