A Grim Memorial Day
Americans have opened nearly 1,000 new graves to bury U.S. troops killed in Iraq since Memorial Day a year ago. The figure is telling — and expected to rise in coming months. In the period from Memorial Day 2006 through Saturday, 980 soldiers and Marines died in Iraq, compared to 807 deaths in the previous year.
In Iraq, Every Day is Memorial Day
Related Links
· Faces of the Fallen - Iraq
· Iraq Coalition Casualties
· Iraq War Casualties
· Iraq Body Counts
· Iraq & Afghanistan War Casualties
· The Cost of War - also 1, 2
· What $1.2 Trillion Can Buy - NYTimes, Jan 2007
· The Memory Hole has the pictures honoring the war dead that the Pentagon didn't want you to see.
· A Soldier's Thoughts on Memorial Day and a Washington Post op-ed by Andrew Bacevich, titled I Lost My Son to a War I Oppose. We Were Both Doing Our Duty.
· And last but not least, this table via a Dailykos post..
| Major Wars | US K. I. A. | US Wounded |
| Revolutionary War | Est 5,000 | Est 6,000 |
| War of 1812 | Est 2500 | Est 5,000 |
| Civil War | 215,000 | Est 400,000 |
| World War 1 | 53,402 | 64,000 |
| World War 2 | 291,557 | 671,846 |
| Korean War | 33,741 | 103,284 |
| Vietnam War | 47,424 | 153,303 |
| Iraq War | 3,454 | 24,417 |
| Afghanistan | 390 | 1393 |
and this post, also via Dailykos
Mark Twain's "The War Prayer", an anti-war prose poem he wrote in the aftermath of the Spanish-American and Phillipine-American wars.
His family begged him not to publish it, his friends advised him to bury it, and his publisher rejected it, thinking it too inflammatory for the times. Twain agreed, but instructed that it be published after his death, saying famously: "None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth."
Washington Monthly's publisher, Markos Kounalakis, made a video of the story for release this Memorial Day. You can watch the video and read the story here.
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