Military families live in dread

A letter home: Mom, I had another friend die today from a massive ied [improvised explosive device] and many more wounded with shattered bones and scrapes. We used to be in the same platoon. … He was barely a day over 19 now that he has passed away. It's tearing me up so badly inside. I just can't stand it. …The most important thing I want you all to do, is to use all of your connections to do everything in your will to use my death as a tool with the media to end this pointless war. Contact Michael Moore or whomever it may be to get the word out about how disgusted with our government I am about forcing us to come here to wait for death to claim us. I want it to end. How many more friends, sons, daughters, mothers, and dads must die here before they say it's enough? love, Zach

'Death," said Donald Rumsfeld, the former United States defence secretary, "has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war."

Zach Flory, 23, didn't start his military career depressed. He enlisted full of idealism about the potential of American power. Raised in Clinton, Iowa, on the banks of the Mississippi, he came home on September 11 and asked his parents for permission to join the military. They refused. They wanted him to finish high school first.

"He was a young man with a conscience," said his mother, Marcia, who has always been opposed to the war. "He wanted to make things right."

Military families listen intently to every news report and live in constant fear of a visit from two uniformed officers in the wee hours. But the rest of the nation is shopping. This is the only war in modern American history that has coincided with a tax cut. "People seem to think war is OK as long as it is someone else's kid doing the fighting," says Zach's dad, Don.

There is gruesome irony [from an] administration headed by a president who dodged the draft and a vice-president who "had other priorities" than serving in Vietnam.

[Excerpt of an article by Gary Younge, The Guardian]