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Before we did our turn in the hopper, my unit had to do funeral duty for SFC Daniel Petithory, one of our first sacrifices of the war. When it turned out the Army mortuary affairs guys had forgotten Dan's HALO badge, one of our guys stepped up and took the one off his own uniform. It went into the cold Massachusetts earth with Dan... the least we could do for a great American, was to see him buried with all his honours.

No big Administration officials attended. However, one of the generals that did brought a letter to Dan's parents, a letter from Vice President Dick Cheney.

The letter was handwritten. I don't know what it said, it wasn't our guys' business to read that letter, from a statesman to a grieving family. But Dick Cheney, whose time in the middle of a war is arguably worth more than yours or mine or Sid Schanberg's, sat down with pen in hand and composed his own thoughts for those unhappy people. I am told he has done this for many casualties -- not just Dan. (There was also a letter from the President, which was hand-signed but printed).

You may recall that President Bush, and many other leaders, has visited seriously wounded soldiers in Walter Reed Army Hospital.

But Sidney Schanberg would have us believe that Bush and Cheney et al., don't care, and Schanberg, the legendary enthusiast of and apologist for Pol Pot, does. It must be rough to be Schanberg, to live in New York and see the ruination of your socialist, anti-individual, anti-American ideals around the world in every day's news, and to find the only outlet you have for celebration is to enjoy and exploit the deaths of young privates, who did something you would never do: stand against the perpetrators of killing fields, then and now.

Schanberg is a contemptible fraud and this article is contemptible, despicable treason. Any of the dictators who he has praised and succored and excused over the last thirty-five years would have shot him for far less. It is a measure of the greatness of our Republic that we suffer this reprehensible homunculus to live.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F