Two years after soldiers' deaths, families are told circumstances

[Barrett808]

Two years after soldiers' deaths, families are told circumstances
Parents: Attack by Iraqi trainees was kept quiet
By Scott Gold
Los Angeles Times
July 31. 2006 8:00AM

The sun rose over central Iraq as the soldiers, searching for weapon stashes, trudged past a bombed-out police station and through shoulder-high fields of wheat, lugging M-16s, mine detectors and grenades. Sometimes they fell, stumbling over large clumps of dirt turned up by farmers. Sometimes they talked about dying; they had been sent to a place that was, in the detached vernacular of the military, "not friendly."

Most often, though, they cursed and complained; their mission had begun at 3 a.m., on little sleep, with no breakfast. Before long, it was 100 degrees. They had been paired up with trainees from the Iraqi national guard, who were falling behind. A lieutenant was learning how to say "keep up" in Arabic when the gunfire began.

It has been two years since that morning, since two California Army National Guard soldiers - Spc. Patrick McCaffrey Sr., 34, of Tracy and 1st Lt. Andre Tyson, 33, of Riverside - were killed.

Late last month, military officials gave the families of the soldiers more than 200 pages of documents outlining their investigation into the killings. The documents confirmed what the soldiers' families had long suspected - that McCaffrey and Tyson were not killed by insurgents, as the military initially reported, but by their purported allies, by Iraqis whom they had trained to fight.

(more)

http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060731/REPOSITORY/607310331/1013/48HOURS

[Moderator]

1. Reprint ( not LBN)

This is a June 21st article reprinted from the Los Angeles Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-soldiers21jun21,1,1989411.story?coll=la-headlines-world