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This post was inspired by Blue Girl.

Alex, among the first group of soldiers in Iraq to have their tours extended three months*, is nearing the end of his duty,

Going home is a beautiful, terrifying thought to have once it gets this close to happening.

I’ll look back on the hysterical laughter during fifteen hour Baghdad clears, the terror of being pinned down by machine gun fire, the sight of a Stryker on its side and the unfolding of a body bag under the flames of a nearby school, unzipped tenderly to fit the body of Chevy as RPGs screamed overhead. Soon this place will all be in the past.

The key to it all [the surge] would be 24/7 interaction with Iraqi Army and a constant presence among the Iraqi citizens, giving them confidence in the mission of coalition forces. The building we picked used to be a whiskey distillery, and we’ve been busy putting up concrete barriers and wire around it. A house was too close to where the wall was supposed to be, so engineers blew it to smithereens and sent the family packing. The father owned the plot for forty years and comes by every so often to collect the useful bricks left scattered a hundred yards in every direction. Before he entered once, I patted his seventy year old frame down like a common criminal.

Next month we’ll be the first unit home that completed a three month extension. We were one of few to see Iraq before and after the surge. If the media got anything right, it was that the surge failed.

* One way the Pentagon increased the number of US soldiers inside Iraq during the surge was to make some soldiers stay in Iraq longer.

Sources:

Full Blog Entry on Army of Dude "I Can Taste It"

Originally posted on GDAEman Blog

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"I don't want to be here any more."

The happy-talk coming out of aWol's mouth is not cutting it with those who are actually sacrificing and being sacrificed. In fact, they are downright disdainful. last month, in a dining hall at a base south of Baghdad, aWol was speechifyin' on a big-screen teevee and the soldiers didn't even look up from their chicken and mashed potatoes.

"I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed," said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien, one of those in the dining hall in Yousifiya, 10 miles south of Baghdad, as Bush's speech aired last month. "I don't want to be here anymore."

The frustration and sagging morale is palpable, and it is being expressed in overt statements and in ranting blog posts like this one: "This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasboard of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second," a soldier in Diyala province, north of Baghdad, wrote in an Aug. 7 post on his blog, Army of Dude.

The suicide rate in the Army is at the highest level in 23 years. The evidence is even in the latrines. Someone posted the Army's "help cards" listing nine warning signs for suicide in the stalls. One of the cards had seven of the boxes checked. Of the 99 suicides committed by Army personnel last year, 27 of them took place in Iraq. A mental health survey released in May revealed that 45% of the soldiers interviewed ranked morale as low or very low, and only seven percent ranked it as high or very high.

There are two faces to the occupation of Iraq. There is the reality, which the Soldiers and Marines are facing and dealing with daily, and then there is the face that is shown to the public. With support for continuing the occupation of Iraq at about 30% at home, they dare not show the reality, or that remaining support would crumble.

It is depressing and horrifying and I could rant for pages. In fact, I have, as you know full well if you have read this site...so to close, am going to let the soldier/blogger Alex, from Frisco Texas, have the last word:

"The only person I know who believed Iraq was improving was killed by a sniper in May."

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