I read a news story yesterday that a US soldier said its a tragedy that our country hangs the flags at half staff for the deaths of the VT students, but does not ever hang the flag at half staff for the deaths of US servicemen. I wish I had the link to the story. I think I read it on yahoo.

KABUL, Afghanistan - An Army sergeant complained in a rare opinion article that the U.S. flag flew at half-staff last week at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan for those killed at Virginia Tech but the same honor is not given to fallen U.S. troops here and in Iraq.

In the article issued Monday by the public affairs office at Bagram military base north of Kabul, Sgt. Jim Wilt lamented that his comrades’ deaths have become a mere blip on the TV screen, lacking the “shock factor” to be honored by the Stars and Stripes as the deaths at Virginia Tech were.

“I find it ironic that the flags were flown at half-staff for the young men and women who were killed at VT, yet it is never lowered for the death of a U.S. service member,” Wilt wrote.

He noted that Bagram obeyed President Bush’s order last week that all U.S. flags at federal locations be flown at half-staff through April 22 to honor 32 people killed at Virginia Tech by a 23-year-old student gunman who then killed himself.

“I think it is sad that we do not raise the bases’ flag to half-staff when a member of our own task force dies,” Wilt said.

According to the Defense Department, 315 U.S. service members have died in and around Afghanistan since the U.S.-led offensive that toppled the Taliban regime in late 2001, 198 of them in combat.

NATO’s International Security Assistance Force said that the flags of all its troop-contributing nations are flown at half-staff for about 72 hours after the service member’s death “as a mark of respect when there is an ISAF fatality.”

Sgt. 1st Class Dean Welch, who works with Wilt at the U.S.-led coalition public affairs office, said the essay is a “soldier’s commentary, not the view of the coalition and not the view of the U.S. forces.”

Welch added that such outspoken opinion pieces are rare.

Wilt suggested that flags should fly at half-staff on the base where the fallen service member was working and in the states where they hail from. He said some states do this, but not all of them.

He wrote that the death of a U.S. service member is just as violent as those at the university last week, but it lacks the “shock factor of the Virginia massacre.”

“It is a daily occurrence these days to see X number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq or Afghanistan scrolling across the ticker at the bottom of the TV screen. People have come to expect casualty counts in the nightly news; they don’t expect to see 32 students killed,” he wrote.

“If the flags on our (operating bases) were lowered for just one day after the death of a service member, it would show the people who knew the person that society cared, the American people care.”

I read that too...here it is...



Hate to sound like an asshole, but that's not what we do. Troops fight. And troops may die.

College kids go to school. They aren't supposed to die doing that.

One is a tragedy...the other, an inevitability...

I heard on the radio this morning that tony blair is about to start pulling british troops... f'n pansies.

you know we really will all be speaking arabic within the next 20-30 years. I just hope our masters still let us play computer games and drive muscle cars. good luck women, enjoy your rights while you still have em! Ooh, maybe I can get an AK-47 pretty cheap!!

Most of the servicemen are the age of college students.

what the fuck are you talking about? Good, Britain has enough common sense to know that NOTHING is being fixed over there

although the british troop pullout won't really change much, as the pansies never had many over there in the first place, I don't think you (along with the democratic senate) realize the implications of pulling out of iraq. you might as well go ahead and get you a pretty hood & sheet to wear

although the british troop pullout won't really change much, as the pansies never had many over there in the first place, I don't think you (along with the democratic senate) realize the implications of pulling out of iraq. you might as well go ahead and get you a pretty hood & sheet to wear

like i've said tons of times on here, war is not a game. you don't fight for X amount of time, and then tell your enemy "oh well X amount of time has passed, we're takin off". If that type of logic was used in war, we'd all be speaking German right now and kids would be saying "heil hitler" in the morning instead of the pledge of allegiance. hell, maybe even "pledge of allegiance, to the confederacy..".

people are also too black & white on war. you want a victory or a defeat. with our modern warfare, there is no such thing. WW2, we won. we won because we KILLED everyone. huge carpet bombing killed tens-hundreds of thousands of civilians, but that made it decisive. it's ironic, that in this day and age, we can pinpoint our military targets, thus saving tens-hundreds of thousands of lives, and it results in our democratic leaders feeling that this means there's nothing being accomplished. we could simply bomb the hell out of the entire country and that would be an easy victory, but imho we're doing it the right way, saving lives of the innocents, and killing those who take the innocents lives. if it takes a little longer than a few B-52 strafing runs, that's fine by me.

tell me, if you were an islamic militant in Iraq fighting the americans to regain control of the country, and heard that the american senate passed (theoretical here) a bill requiring the pullout of all american troops within one year, what would you do?