We are in deep trouble if the soliders are in league with the terrorists, which is what it seems:
Spc. David Williams, 22, of Boston, Mass., had two note cards in his pocket Wednesday afternoon as he waited for Sen. Joseph Lieberman. Williams serves in the 82nd Airborne Division from Fort Bragg, N.C., the first of the five “surge” brigades to arrive in Iraq, and he was chosen to join the Independent from Connecticut for lunch at a U.S. field base in Baghdad.
The night before, 30 other soldiers crowded around him with questions for the senator.
He wrote them all down. At the top of his note card was the question he got from nearly every one of his fellow soldiers:
“When are we going to get out of here?”
***“We’re not making any progress,” Hedin said, as he recalled a comrade who was shot by a sniper last week. “It just seems like we drive around and wait to get shot at.”
But as he waited two chairs down from where Lieberman would sit, Hedin said he’d never voice his true feelings to the senator.
“I think I’d be a private if I did,” he joked. “It’s just more troops, more targets.”
In the past two months, the unit has lost two men. In May alone, at least 120 U.S. troops died in Iraq, the bloodiest month in 2007 and the highest number since the battles of Fallujah in 2004.
Spc. Kevin Krasco, 20, of Medford, Mass., and Spc. Kevin Adams, 20, of Moosup, Conn., chimed in with their dismay before turning the conversation to baseball.
“It’s like everything else in this war,” Adams said, referring to Baghdad. “It hasn’t changed.”
***As Lieberman walked out, he said that congressionally mandated withdrawal would be a “victory for al-Qaida and a victory for Iran.”
“They’re not Pollyannaish about this,” he said referring to the young soldiers he ate lunch with. “They know it’s not going to be solved in a day or a month.”
It isn’t clear whether Williams mentioned the last line on his note card, the one that had a star next to it.
“We don’t feel like we’re making any progress,” it said.
If you ask the soldiers, this is the most maddening thing- the visits from blowhards like Lieberman who come in, “listen” to the troops, and then go out and say whatever they planned to say, regardless what they have “learned” in their heavily guarded photo-op tours of the region. The problem for these soldiers is they just don’t understand that when they signed the contract for service, they pledged that they would die for their country. Lieberman and the other ‘stay the course’ fools just want to hold them to their word.