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Sad about being right


June 08, 2007 - 12:23 a.m.

I am a smartass.

It's been my whole life.

Sometimes I am very sad to be right.

The day the Fuckhead-in-Chief stood on that carrier and pronounced "mission accomplished," the death toll of Americans over there was a bit over 500. I grunted and turned to other people at the bar and said, "you mark my words, before we get out of there, it's gonna be thirty-five hundred!"

They laughed.

Today, the total went up to three thousand, five hundred one.

I am actually very sad to be right. All these years later, all the technology we've developed to protect soldiers, to keep track of the bad guys, to counter offensive threats, and still, in a little over four years, we've lost more people than in the first four years in Vietnam. And we've spent more dollars than in all of World War II.

I don't choose to focus on the hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies -- and these are just the American soldiers, never mind the British, the Koreans, the Kuwaitis, the Italians, the Japanese, and who knows who else, and of course the tens of thousands of Iraqi nationals -- but instead to focus on the first person I knew to die in Iraq:

http://arlingtoncemetery.net/stswartworth.htm

I knew Sharon not through combat, but through her involvement in the Lotus Notes/Domino community and her efforts to bring that technology to the Army. She was tiny, barely five feet if you took her heels off, a powerhouse, technically astute, opinionated, very smart. She could drink a roomful of geeks under the table and get up the next day and attend a daylong marathon of Lotusphere sessions, and through it all, still look terrific. Blonde, cute, and in-your-face, she was a great advocate for technology as a way to make everybody's job easier. When I heard she died, I did a lot of research to find out why.

She was in Tikrit on what was essentially a PR mission. She was barely a year or two from retiring to Hawaii with her husband. She had her years in, she was in the Army JAG, she was a technologist. Why the fuck she was flying over Tikrit in a Blackhawk is beyond me. They say it was a PR mission, a bunch of statesiders going over to buck up the troops. I'm not even giving it its due, but from the outside, it was horseshit. A valuable lady, a talented developer and analyst, blown out of the sky for the sake of Bush and Rump-fed's grandstanding stunt in the Near East.

At the time, I wrote that Bush owed me. I knew Sharon, and for her to die over there, so far out of what should have been her element, seemed an enormous waste.

I have not been to her grave in Arlington. I should go.

I should go before the counter spins too many more times. Before the blade takes too many more good people caught up in a jingoistic nightmare from which we can't seem to wake.


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