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12/25/2004:

"Remembering the Dead and the Horror of Mosul"

MOSUL, Iraq, Dec. 24 - On Tuesday, Sgt. Michael S. Posner was standing in the middle of a crowded dining hall at Forward Operating Base Marez, holding a cheeseburger and fries on a lunch tray and looking for his friends, when a huge force blew him off his feet.

The rows of tables and chairs shattered into a chaos of debris and blood. Screams tore through the room. The air turned dusky with the gray aftermath of smoke and dust, out of which the faces of the living and the dead slowly emerged.

On Friday, Sergeant Posner, 34, from Farmingville, N.Y., was one of hundreds of service members who went to the base's movie theater to honor two of the 14 American soldiers killed in the attack. In pairs, they filed past a now-familiar battlefield monument: the dead men's helmets and dog tags slung on their M-16's, propped up between their combat boots.

The mourners touched the helmets, sobbed, bowed their heads.

...One of the soldiers who died in the explosion had lived in Brooklyn for three years before enlisting in the Army. The soldier, Staff Sgt. Julian S. Melo, 47, was assigned to a Stryker Brigade Combat Team based at Fort Lewis, Wash.

He "loved being in the military," said his wife, Norma Melo, in an interview Friday night from their home in Spanaway, Wash.

She said Sergeant Melo would have been proud to die serving his country. "He wouldn't have wanted it any other way," she said. "He was there with friends, and he didn't die alone."
Full Article: nytimes

Everybody should read Graham Greene's The Quiet American for a portrait of that American 'innocence' which allows them to bomb civilians and decimate countries, and then gather together in these ceremonies of sentiment to mourn their own dead without irony...American 'innocence' is the most frighteningly destructive force in the world.