NYT: In Iraq War, Death Also Comes to Soldiers in Autumn of Life

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/18/international/middleeast/18OLDER.html?hp=&pagewanted=print&position=

Master Sgt. Thomas R. Thigpen was 52 when he fell dead of a heart attack during a touch-football game in Kuwait on March 16 — a casualty that does not quite fit the standard template of wartime tragedy: the fresh-faced 18-year-old cut down with the promise of a full life ahead.

He was not the oldest to die since the invasion of Iraq. That would be Staff Sgt. William D. Chaney, 59, who operated the machine gun in the door of his unit's Black Hawk helicopters — the same job he performed in Vietnam — and died after surgery for an intestinal problem. Sgt. Floyd G. Knighten Jr., 55, serving in Kuwait in the same unit as his 21-year-old son, died of heat stroke while driving a Humvee without air-conditioning across the scorching Iraqi desert.

In all, 10 soldiers age 50 or older have died in the Iraq war, some of medical ailments that might have excluded them from earlier conflicts, others under fire in the heat of battle. That is a small percentage of the nearly 900 American service members who have died since the Iraq war began, but it is 10 times the percentage of men in that age group who died in Vietnam. It is nearly as many as those of that age who died in the entire Korean War.

And those 10 deaths, if no sadder than those of the young soldiers who never left their teens, have created a far different, and perhaps surprising, landscape of grief. It is a scene not of spring, but of harvest: a total of 11 grandchildren left behind, 21 decades of marriage, years of service to communities, mortgages nearly paid off, and long careers that were already pointed toward retirement.

[Mari333]

1. Bush could care less . His friends and oil co CEOs could care less.

Republicans dont care, and neither do the top 1% who profit from the deaths of our soldiers.
They are meaningless to them.

[disgruntled_goat]

2. i guess that's one way to save on social security

reduce by a huge amount the number of us who will live long
enough to collect it.

mmm. fiscal conserving. </heaviest possible sarcasm>

my grasp of American English obscenities is wholly
insufficient to express my rage at these subhumans in the
administration, so let me try this:

On the net there are still a few ideas one cannot express
without the authorities getting involved. I'm thinking of at
least one of them right now....and I bet you are too.

edited so i can use my damn angle brackets!

[movonne]

3. This is one of the most horrible crimes that this war has brought

out. I don't remember this ever...I didn't think they took people this old!!! Were these from the Natl guard????

[rfkrocks]

4. Endless evidence against a corrupt anti-American regime

The real story of our great commander-in-chief is that he is destroying a military that has been strong and successful through both democratic and republican administration-corporate owned government makes us expendable in the battlefield or in the workplace-it is a continuing disgrace that people not fit physically to serve are pushed to a meaningless war to die for the vainglory of a profoundly ignorant and heartless leader-how can this election be close unless Americans have lost the capacity to reason-