Iraq Quote of the Day

I noticed the mother attempting to breast feed her little baby and yet the baby continued to cry. [The interpreter] who is a certified and well educated doctor of internal medicine educated in Iraq, told me that the mother, because she was very frightened by our presence, was not able to breast feed her baby because the glands in the breast close up due to sympathetic responses to fear and stressful situations. I then tried to reassure the mother by allowing her to leave the room and attain some privacy so that she could relax and feed her child. I felt something that had been brooding under the attained callousness of my heart for some time.

My heart finally broke for the Iraqi people. I wanted to just sit down and cry while saying I'm so, so sorry for what we had done. I had the acute sense that we had failed these people. It was at this time, and after an entire year of being deployed and well into the next deployment that I realized something. We burst into homes, frighten the hell out of families, and destroy their homes looking for an elusive enemy. We do this out of fear of the unseen and attempt to compensate for our inability to capture insurgents by swatting mosquitoes with a sledge-hammer in glass houses.

- Emails of the fallen soldier,Army Staff Sgt. Darrell Ray Griffin Jr.

via FP blog