Sunday, August 06, 2006
Soldiers are still dying in Iraq
And Our Dear Embattled Leader says we have to stay the course. Jimmy Breslin, writing in Newsday, presents the true cost of ODEL's failure.
"We didn't know," Erin Tinsley, 37, was saying late Friday. "We didn't know what they were here for. Two military women."This is merely one of the many stories that Our Dear Embattled Leader doesn't want to hear. It's not ODEL's fault that the kid couldn't get a gig in the TANG.
Erin was in the hot 10th-floor hallway of the Alfred E. Smith houses on the downtown East Side. Two doors down from her lived the parents of Haiming Hsia, an Army specialist who died Tuesday in an explosion in in Iraq.
"The father let the military women in and then when they came out, he stood there and seemed fine. I thought that they had brought an award for his son."
Erin said she didn't know how long afterward, an hour, maybe two, before the words of the Army officers exploded inside him. He collapsed, and on Friday, somebody from the family said that his wife, the soldier's mother, was unable to cope.
"President Bush took away my son, my only son," the mother had said.
Just this once, there was no poor, helpless family member saying that they were proud that their son had died in this war.
Don't ever say that the young man had died in vain, because that is the icy truth of Iraq that people often cannot handle.
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