The Book Of The Dead

[ThomWV]

During the war in Viet Nam I used to read the Army's newspaper - The Army Times - whenever I got the chance. They listed the war-dead from the previous week in every week's edition and I skimmed the list to see if friends had been killed. In a good week the list would be made up of a hundred fifty or so names, in a bad week it would be twice that. The names continued until 58,195 of them had been listed

As of this morning 3,520 of our service members have died in our war in Iraq. The current rate is about a hundred a month and rising. I don't know if today's Army Times lists their names or not, but if a friend - or more likely the child or grandchild of a friend - were to die in today's war I'd find out quick enough without having to read a paper.

It is the voices of our dead that call to us to end war, how many will it take this time to bring us out into the streets?

[OneBlueSky]

1. one of the things that turned public opinion against the Vietnam was was . . .

a special issue of Life Magazine that pictured every U.S. military casualty in the war . . . each page contained probably 50 or more small photos, and the section went on for page after page after page until it was almost incomprehensible . . . I believe one of the pages made up the cover . . . I still have a copy of this issue somewhere up in the attic, along with a lot of other stuff from that era . . .