Colonel E. W. Chamberlain III

“The most priceless thing we own as a nation is our soldiers, and to throw them away and allow them to be killed and maimed on purpose is a crime. . . . The country hasn’t even begun to measure what the cost will be.” —Colonel E. W. Chamberlain III, U.S. Army (Ret.)
It Would Not Take Long for the Iraq War to claim first its hundreds and then its thousands of soldier and Marine casualties. For a time newspapers, networks, and websites published the pictures of the dead soldiers, with stories about how and where they had been killed. But in many cases that eventually ended, either because publishers felt it was too negative or because it took up too much space and time. Of course the war was a central issue from the beginning of the presidential campaign. “Win the war or cut and run.” It was that simply expressed in the vernacular of politics, which boils even the most complex issues into sound bites and Power Point presentations. The complications of either choice were too difficult for campaign trail specifics. Maybe we had forgotten what a war actually costs.