US runs low on soldiers (NZ Herald)

[joefree1]

19.09.2004
By PETER HUCK

A radio is playing Marvin Gaye's What's Going On as the Veterans for Peace create a memorial known as Arlington West on the beach beside Santa Monica Pier. They are placing 1008 white crosses in the sand - one for each US soldier killed in Iraq as of September 12.

Pictures of the dead are displayed in front of a coffin draped with the US flag and topped with a military helmet. Later, their names will be read out. It is a sobering ceremony on this late summer's day.

With the war locked into a bloody stalemate, the veterans are wondering how the military might find replacements to fill the gaps starkly spelled out by their symbolic cemetery. For despite the Pentagon's boast that it can fight and win two conventional wars, US forces are seriously overstretched.

"We don't have the manpower to sustain the war in Iraq," says Eric Ellis, a Vietnam veteran who helped to start Arlington West. "In Vietnam we had 550,000 troops. We rotated them every year. We had to do one combat tour. Now we have 130,000-odd troops in Iraq. They do a tour, come home, then go back."

More ...
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/storydisplay.cfm?storyID=3592350&thesection=news&thesubsection=world

The price of Bush's hoily war.

[joefree1]

1. Image of Arlington West

http://www.veteransforpeace.org

[Eloriel]

3. Wow -- pretty powerful. Thanks. n/t

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

2. BushCorp plans to bribe them with more pay.

Gee, you'd think all the rich white boys would be lining up to enlist for no pay at all to go and fight for Exxon and Haliburton.

And, if that doesn't work..there's always renaming what's coming to something like the "Uniformed Involunary Work Training Program for Unemployed Youth."