Letters from Iraq: Roll the Dice and Pray
Attention should be paid here. While our cable news networks are sniffing around the Clinton tax return and ooohing and aaahing because they made money over the years since Bill left office, while campaigns desperately try to continue whipping the Jeremiah Wright non-story into a lynching (and yes, I meant to use that word), and while Jake Tapper ponders the significance of Obama possibly falling off the wagon, danger grows by the second in Iraq.
If bombs fall in the Green Zone and it goes unnoticed by our press, does that mean soldiers don’t die?
From Suzanne Langlois, via Huffington Post, a letter from her brave friend Jake, serving on his second tour in Iraq:
Dear Suze,
Let me reflect on a few events of the past week. You have expressed your concern for my safety. I arrogantly told you to relax and to stop watching the news – I’m sorry. For the past week I have been telling my new (future) director that the housing situation in the Green Zone was unsafe. He laughed at me and said that I would be OK. All week I have been having strange thoughts entering my mind. All I could hear was “I’m a dead man walking” repeating in my head.
Yesterday our compound in the Green Zone took a direct mortar hit (I reviewed the pictures today to include the place where I would have been sitting ), miraculously, everyone who had been sitting at a desk had gotten up, and was standing in a doorway at the same time when (we) were hit.
One man’s desk had a slab of marble suck in the middle of it.
Glass exploded everywhere.
Shrapnel pierced every surrounding area.
Doors were ripped out of their hinges.
One man was staring at a dirty mug on his desk and at the right moment he decided to wash it after procrastinating about it for a week – just in time to get away from (the) glass and metal which would have likely killed him.
The window directly behind me, where I would have been at work (had I arrived on time) was completely blown out. Shrapnel filled the entire room and would have left me riddled with metal. That same manager who laughed at me, had gotten up and was standing under a doorway during the moment of the attack.
His chair took two direct hits from metal.
Suzanne, I didn’t hear about it on the news either.
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