Total of UK soldiers killed in Afghanistan = 435
One of latest deaths 'on patrol'
An American soldier killed by a bomb in Afghanistan sent an email to his Congressman weeks earlier stating that he and his men were being placed in 'unnecessary danger'.
Needless death? SSG Matt Sitton, pictured with wife Sarah and newborn son Brodey, questioned the futility of patrolling dangerous minefields for no good reason
The plea from Staff Sergeant Matt Sitton, 26, who ended his email hauntingly 'please pray for us over here' affected Representative Bill Young of Florida so deeply that he has abandoned his previous support for the war.
An aide to Young, chairman of the influential House Appropriations Committee Defense Subcommittee, solemnly read the email into the congressional record during a hearing he had called about the Improvised Explosive (IED) threat.
In his email sent on June 4, SSgt Sitton, from Largo, Florida, whose brigade was suffering an amputee casualty a day, wrote that he appealed to his superiors to cease sending them through 'basically a minefield on a daily basis' for no apparent good reason but had been told to 'stop complaining'.
The married father-of-one said; 'I am all for getting on the ground and fighting for my country when I know there is a desired end state and we have clear guidance of what needs to be done. But when we are told basically to just walk around for a certain amount of time [it] is not sitting well with me.'
SSgt Sitton clearly feared for his own life and those of his men. 'As a Brigade, we are averaging at a minimum an amputee a day from our soldiers because we are walking around aimlessly through grape rows and compounds that are littered with explosives.'
The number of patrols his platoon of 25 had to take - equivalent, he said, to the burden normally carried by 35 to 40 men - was dangerous, he argued.
We see a lot of figures about UK and US Soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Does this refer to soldiers killed in actual combat or solders killed by various means. I believe this is an important point. The US Admin says "we do not count Iraqi deaths or, I believe Afghan deaths; but what other deaths are not counted; maybe if all these where counted up the figure would be significant. If we counted a grand total of all deaths relevant to the "war on terror" the figures would most probably be astronomical.
Posted by: Malcolm Bush | November 01, 2012 at 08:17 PM
Futility , Wilfred Owen
Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
Written in 1918, Wilfred could quite easily be talking about today.What have we learned?
Posted by: patrick | October 25, 2012 at 09:35 AM