[lbo-talk] "Our Sorry Asses Are Ready to Go Home"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

*****   New York Times   June 15, 2003
Anxious and Weary of War, G.I.'s Face a New Iraq Mission
By STEVEN LEE MYERS

...After fighting their way from the Kuwaiti border to Saddam 
International Airport in three fierce weeks, they believed that the 
war - or at least their part of it - was over.

Six months after arriving in Kuwait and almost three months after 
entering Iraq, they were ready to go home. Then they discovered that, 
at least from a soldier's-eye view on the ground, there seemed to be 
no American plan for a postwar Iraq.

The mayhem that followed the collapse of Mr. Hussein's government on 
April 9 has thrust them into a new mission: keeping peace, even as 
their weary minds and bodies are still at war.

"You call Donald Rumsfeld and tell him our sorry asses are ready to 
go home," Pfc. Matthew C. O'Dell, an infantryman in Sergeant 
Betancourt's platoon, said as he stood guard on Tuesday. "Tell him to 
come spend a night in our building."...

<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/15/international/worldspecial/15ARMY.html> 
*****
-- 
Yoshie

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