LOS ANGELES, 11 April 2004 — A year after the toppling of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, or at least his statue, the jubilant jingoism that accompanied that symbolic moment has faded like an old fax, and across America Friday, the cost of a controversial war half a world away was starting to hit home.
Newspapers featured pictures of body-bagged US Marines on their front pages, TV news shows zoomed in on pictures of burning convoys and troops praying over their dead comrades while the families and friends of fallen soldiers granted dark media interviews that expressed their pride, their pain and their frustration with a war that is stretching the US military.
From Fort Hood in Texas to Camp Pendleton in Southern California, news reporters focused on some of the largest military bases in the United States to show readers and viewers the human toll of the war in Iraq.
Fort Hood is home to the 1st Cavalry Division, and people danced in the streets when local troops found Saddam cowering in a tiny bunker in December. Now, the mood is very different. In just the past few days, eight soldiers from the base have lost their lives as Iraqi insurgents hit them with small arms fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
“These are the worst of times for a community that just a few months ago was celebrating the best,” Frank Buckley, CNN’s national correspondent, commented in a somber report.
A grieving mother gave an insight into her state of mind and the morale of the troops in the quagmire of Iraq. “He knew he wasn’t coming back,” she sobbed of her dead son. “He warned me that he would only come back in a coffin.”
In Los Angeles, the spotlight was focused on the withering casualties suffered by the Marines stationed nearby at the massive Camp Pendleton. Soldiers from the base’s 4th Regiment, who call themselves “The Magnificent Bastards”, are fighting at the flashpoint of the insurgency in Ramadi. Since Sunday, 17 Marines from the base have been killed there, leaving Camp Pendleton in a state of shock.
The dead included a bearish former drill sergeant and rugby aficionado whom comrades called “The Beast”, two young infantrymen who had vowed to help keep each other alive in Iraq and a company lieutenant who joined the Marines after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the Los Angeles Times noted. It quoted a grieving mother on the worst news of all. “I went to the door, and there were two Marines dressed in blue,” she said. “I said, ‘No, not Ben.’ They just nodded their heads. They say Marines take care of their own, and they’ll be here for us, but that doesn’t help when he’s gone.”
Although opinion polls have yet to reflect the impact of the chaos in Iraq, the toll seems evident from the Pacific coast to the heartland of America. The Chicago Tribune reported a growing sense of local disenchantment. “We had no business being there in the first place,” grumbled one man. “With 600 people killed, it’s time to take everybody out.”
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has long warned of the inadequacies of President George W. Bush’s Iraq policy. His comments Friday bore an unabashed tone of “I told you so” toward a president who has chosen to get away to his Texas ranch during this week’s crisis.
“It’s hard to imagine that the news out of Iraq could be more dreadful,” Herbert wrote Friday. “After the loss of at least 634 American troops and the expenditure of countless billions of dollars, we’ve succeeded in getting the various Iraqi factions to hate us more than they hate each other. The administration has no real plan on how to proceed.”
As usual, it was one of the country’s pack of accomplished cartoonists who summed up the situation best. Ed Stein, in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain News, drew a picture of a befuddled Bush looking at an Iraqi exit map. Next to him was a signpost with arrows pointing in different directions. All of them said Vietnam.
