Americans were shocked and horrified to learn that on March 31, four U.S. civilians were ambushed and killed in Fallujah, Iraq. Their bodies, burned from their automobiles exploding, were dragged through the streets of Fallujah, and two were then hanged from a bridge across the Euphrates River.
Religious leaders in Iraq quickly denounced the actions of the mob, but the damage was already done at that point. The families of Jerry Zovko, Michael Teague, Scott Helvenston and Wesley John Kealoha Batalona will never see these men alive again.
These men weren’t soldiers, though all of them were veterans of the Army or Navy. They worked for a North Carolina security company charged with storing and keeping track of military food rations in that area of Iraq. But they were Americans, and that was more than good enough for the mob that killed them.
It is doubtful, however, that the mob realized the effect their actions would have.
In the two weeks since the four deaths, the violence has escalated. Six hundred Iraqis have died in hospitals in the Fallujah region, after a lockdown on the town turned into a siege on April 5. The death count becomes much higher when one realizes that more are dying before reaching care facilities.
“I could see many bodies in the streets. Hundreds were lying in the street. Relatives were too scared to get them,” Samir Rabee, told The New York Times. Rabee is a Fallujah resident who managed to flee the city during a lull in the fighting.
Bodies of the dead are being buried wherever there is space, including soccer fields. Fallujah residents have dubbed one such field “Graveyard of the Martyrs.”
For surely that’s the title deserved by anyone brave enough to take on the Mighty American Military?
“What I think you will find is 95 percent of those (bodies) were military- age males that were killed in the fighting,” Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne told The New York Times.
But how many of those “military age males” are inexperienced 16-year-old boys, or grizzled 50-year-old men? How many were extremists simply wanting their town back from the invading American troops?
How is that an extreme view?
Martyrs, indeed.
Now, I’m a military brat. My father and two uncles currently serve in the Air Force, and I have two more uncles in the Army. About a third of my high school class went directly into the military upon – or even before – graduation.
My sympathies lie firmly with every American soldier – and civilian – who is risking their life at the say-so of the current administration.
But I also believe that enough is too much.
Iraqi militants, with demands that U.S. and other forces withdraw from their country, have taken hostage nationals from Russia, China, Japan, and America in Iraq – for whatever reason. Can you really blame them?
The guerillas have threatened to burn the hostages alive if their demands are not met.
So, of course, our government will formulate another rescue a la Jessica Lynch, and the Graveyard of Martyrs will have a few new residents.
Martyrs indeed.
A death toll of 600-plus Iraqis in Fallujah in the past two weeks, among countless other Iraqi deaths since the U.S. occupation began. Death from bullets and explosions and fire and God only knows what else.
A death toll of more than 600 Americans in Iraq over the past year.
A minimum of 1,200 souls sacrificed.
How many more must die?