A Note To Tuesday's Chat Participants

In Tuesday's weekly live online chat, we talked a lot about Sept. 11 and the war in Iraq. I made reference to reading a recent article by a group of sergeants writing about the war from a first-hand perspective. The article was an op-ed piece that appeared in the New York Times on Aug. 19.

Here is a news story that appeared in the Times yesterday and in our newspaper today:

By DAVID STOUT
Published: September 12, 2007

WASHINGTON, Sept. 12 — “Engaging in the banalties of life has become a death-defying act,” the seven soldiers wrote of the war they had seen in Iraq.

They were referring to the ordeals of Iraqi citizens, trying to go about their lives with death and suffering all around them. They did not know it at the time, but they might almost have been referring to themselves.

Two of the soldiers who wrote of their pessimism about the war, in an Op-Ed article that appeared in The New York Times on Aug. 19, were killed in Baghdad on Monday. They were not killed in combat, nor on a daring mission. They died when the five-ton cargo truck they were riding in overturned.

The victims, Staff Sgt. Yance T. Gray, 26, and Sgt. Omar Mora, 28, were among the authors of “The War as We Saw It,” in which they expressed doubts about reports of progress....

Comments

[Boo Boo]

I hope the mothers of these boys are not asked to make a TV commercial. You know the one that tells us how it's worth all the lives we have to make sure Iraq has a stable government.