Fatigue cripples US army in Iraq (MSM treason alert)

Guardian UK ^ | August 12, 2007 | Peter Beaumont

[balch3]

Lieutenant Clay Hanna looks sick and white. Like his colleagues he does not seem to sleep. Hanna says he catches up by napping on a cot between operations in the command centre, amid the noise of radio. He is up at 6am and tries to go to sleep by 2am or 3am. But there are operations to go on, planning to be done and after-action reports that need to be written. And war interposes its own deadly agenda that requires his attention and wakes him up.

When he emerges from his naps there is something old and paper-thin about his skin, something sketchy about his movements as the days go by.

The Americans he commands, like the other men at Sullivan - a combat outpost in Zafraniya, south east Baghdad - hit their cots when they get in from operations. But even when they wake up there is something tired and groggy about them. They are on duty for five days at a time and off for two days. When they get back to the forward operating base, they do their laundry and sleep and count the days until they will get home. It is an exhaustion that accumulates over the patrols and the rotations, over the multiple deployments, until it all joins up, wiping out any memory of leave or time at home. Until life is nothing but Iraq.

Hanna and his men are not alone in being tired most of the time. A whole army is exhausted and worn out. You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Where once the war in Iraq was defined

[Sarajevo]

You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust.

Such putrid BS! When I go over to BIAP, I see no such thing.

[metesky]

Good thing that both these “reporters” and the soldiers they’re reporting on weren’t slogging up the Italian boot in 1944. Then they’d know what fatigue is...

[PGalt]

Thanks. Thanks to all who have served, are serving, or will serve in the future. America’s finest.

[Allegra]

"You see the young soldiers washed up like driftwood at Baghdad's international airport, waiting to go on leave or returning to their units, sleeping on their body armour on floors and in the dust."

Such putrid BS! When I go over to BIAP, I see no such thing.

What a load this whole article is!! The media just spews a bunch of fiction and the sad thing is, a lot of sheeple buy right into it.

I'm doing the BIAP thing in a couple of days, headed out on a brief R&R. (W'hoooo!) I'll make sure I keep an eye out for all of that "driftwood." Not that I've ever seen anything like what is described here in all of the times I've been through there.

Good freakin' grief.