"I don't see any progress. Just us getting killed," said Spc. Yvenson Tertulien [...] during Bush's speech in July. "I don't want to be here anymore."
The troops ain't down with the program.
"...signs of frustration and flagging morale are unmistakable, from the blunt comments of troops, to soldiers' online rants, to the grim findings of surveys on military morale and suicides.
Sometimes the signs are found in latrines.
In the stalls at Baghdad's Camp Liberty, someone had posted Army-issued help cards listing "nine signs of suicide." On one card posted above a toilet, seven of the boxes had been checked.
"This occupation, this money pit, this smorgasbord of superfluous aggression is getting more hopeless and dismal by the second," wrote a soldier in Diyala province north of Baghdad in an Aug. 7 posting on his blog, www.armyofdude.blogspot.com.
"The only person I know who believed Iraq was improving was killed by a sniper in May," said the blogger, identified as Alex from Frisco, Texas, in a separate e-mail.
The Army's suicide rate is at its highest in 23 years: 17.3 deaths per 100,000 soldiers compared with 12.4 per 100,000 in 2003, the first year of the war. Of the 99 soldier suicides last year, 27 were in Iraq.
The latest in a series of mental-health surveys among troops in Iraq, released in May, said 45 percent of 1,320 soldiers queried ranked morale in their unit as low or very low. Seven percent ranked it high or very high."
Meanwhile, we're at 3724.
Sorry for what must seem like relentless negativity. We live in awful times.
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