While Bush Vacations, US Troops Battle Exhaustion & Stress

Why must we turn to the foreign press to cover stories like this one in the U.K. Guardian:

Exhaustion and combat stress are besieging US troops in Iraq as they battle with a new type of warfare. Some even rely on Red Bull to get through the day. As desertions and absences increase, the military is truggling to cope with the crisis.

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“The army is worn out. We are just keeping people in theatre who are exhausted,” says a soldier working for the US army public affairs office who is supposed to be telling me how well things have been going since the “surge” in Baghdad began.

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A week later, in the northern city of Mosul, an officer talks privately. “We're plodding through this,” he says after another patrol and another ambush in the city centre. “I don't know how much more plodding we've got left in us.”

When the soldiers talk like this there is resignation. There is a corrosive anger, too, that bubbles out, like the words pouring unbidden from a chaplain's assistant who has come to bless a patrol. “Why don't you tell the truth? Why don't you journalists write that this army is exhausted?”

Please read the entire article here.