Sean Webster was helping other severely wounded Iraq vets cope with their injuries but, in the end, could not save himself.  

For the past  year, Sgt. Sean Webster, 23,  had worked in  Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Pendleton, aiding sailors and Marines wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan get much-needed medical and psychological care.  

Just two weeks ago he was featured in a front-page story on this effort in the local North County Times newspaper.   "I'm a wounded Marine and I know what these guys are going through," he said.

A Nation that sends its Sons and Daughters into Occupations?

A C-17 Airforce Transport plane arrives in Kandahar, Afghanistan to receive the bodies of five U.S. service members killed. Though more than 1,000 US and coalition forces were on hand to participate in the "ramp ceremony," a Los Angeles Times reporter and photographer were asked to leave the area by a military public affairs officer. A Pentagon policy banning coverage of this particular event was cited as the reason. [Photo: Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times]

So, here I am happily returned from gathering signatures for our neighborhood on a new rule we wish to put in.  I figured I'd scan DKos and The Page by Mark Halperin real fast and see what I had maybe missed.  It seems I missed alot this last week.

Every week, on Friday, Mark puts out a PDF for "Campaign Scorecard".  I usually find it interesting, but something stuck out at me like a sore thumb, considering I made a post about it last night here.

Was rather surprised to have what I said in the Lara Logan diary, to be so blatantly confirmed by Mark.

The "soldier suicide" epidemic in Iraq continues.  Another young American soldier, this one age 19, has apparently killed himself in Iraq, and at least two other reports  of "noncombat" deaths in the past week or so may fall in the same category.  

As usual, the latest case emerged from a local newspaper, while the Pentagon continues an investigation that usually leads to no public announcement.  I had followed this incident from the beginning, so the report of a likely suicide does not surprise me.  

He was Pvt. Eugene D.M. Kanakaole, who hailed from  Hawaii, and was assigned to the 87th Engineer Company.  According to the report this weekend in the Anderson Daily Herald in Indiana (where his mother once lived),  he was found in Balad, Iraq, on June 11 with a single bullet wound in his head.

For five years now, I have been chronicling the disturbing number of "noncombat" deaths in Iraq, often suicides, which usually come to light only due to the diligence of local newspapers.  As part of that effort, last August I briefly described  yet another case, involving a 20-year-old Texas woman named Kamisha Block, who apparently was much loved in her Vidor hometown.  It was said to be death by "friendly fire," which officially is fairly rare in Iraq, so I kept an eye on it for days, in case of an update.

Many more nonhostile deaths arrived, and so I forgot about Kamisha.  Last night, a reader sent me a link to a diary here by "greenies,"  which in turn led me to a news article in yesterday’s Beaumont Enterprise.    I'm updating and expanding that diary now.

Forget friendly fire.  It turns out that Spc. Block was actually murdered, and the killer, another soldier, Staff Sgt. Brandon Norris, then turned the gun on himself.

As many of us celebrate, or at least mark, Father's Day today,  feel free to spend at least a moment to ponder the countless children left fatherless by our war in Iraq.  The numbers in Iraq, of course, are staggering but for now let's just consider the nearly forgotten  here in the U.S.  

American fatalities are listed in our newspapers, and I write several times a week about how families react to the individual deaths, particularly of the noncombat variety.  Ceremonies are held, flags presented, tributes published.   But there (even for me, I confess) the stories always end.  

As has been asked in so many other contexts: What about the children?  Especially on Father's Day.  Here are some disturbing specifics.

In May, 17 US and Allied troops were killed in combat in Iraq and 19 were killed in combat in Afghanistan.  Today, 4 more US troops were killed in Afghanistan. read story here

And yesterday, the Taliban attacked the main Afghan prison, resulting in hundreds of militants escaping.

More after the jump.

Arlington South Memorial -Memorial Day Weekend '08

While U.S. hostile fire fatalities in Iraq last month dropped to their lowest level since December, the news has been far grimmer coming out of Afghanistan.  In terms of enemy fire, May 2008 was the second deadliest month of the war since hostilities began in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11.  This also marked the end of the deadliest 12-month period for U.S. troops in combat in Afghanistan since the war began nearly seven years ago.

Sgt. Jason Dene, the nephew of actress and activist Mia Farrow, died in Iraq last week and his uncle blames the "war criminal" George W. Bush for the loss.  Mia Farrow has written a sad tribute on her site but Dene's uncle, Patrick V. Farrow, took his anger to the Letters section of the Rutland (Vt.) Herald two days ago.

Dene, in his mid-30s and married with children, is yet another in the growing list of "noncombat" fatalities in Iraq.  I have studied these tragedies for almost five years (and written about them often here).   In this case,   medical complications appear to be at issue.   Patrick Farrow, of Castleton, Vt.,  writes, "To date all the family has heard from the Army is that Jason variously died 'in his sleep' and 'in his bunk' and 'in his quarters'  and my favorite 'sleep apnea complicated by smoking cigarettes,'  in other words, natural causes."

Whatever the cause, Patrick Farrow knows what really killed his nephew: "Because of the arrogant, corrupt lies of George W. Bush and his neo-con handlers my nephew is dead, and I am mad as hell...Jason Dene was not killed by enemy fire nor friendly fire but by Bush's brutal and cynical stop-loss program."

For nearly five years -- long before I started doing it recently at DailyKos -- Editor & Publisher has tracked the growing number of suicides among U.S. military personnel in Iraq and after they return home. The deaths are usually branded as simply from "nonhostile" causes by the Pentagon, and the real news often emerges only from local newspapers (yesterday's account concerning a murder/suicide was an exception)

Now it has happened again, via an opinion piece in the Anchorage Daily News.

http://www.adn.com/...

There, Soren Wuerth tells the story of a friend named Merlin, who had graduated from the village school where Wuerth teaches. Merlin had returned to the school, where he had run cross country, to proudly talk about joining the Army and surviving basic training.

Surprised this hasn't been diaried yet:

WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has, since 2001, cremated some of the remains of U.S. service members killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in a Delaware facility that also cremates pets, a practice that ended Friday when the Pentagon banned the arrangement.

The facility, in an industrial park near Dover Air Force Base, has cremated about 200 service members, manager David Bose said Friday night. It uses separate crematories a few feet apart to cremate humans and animals, he added.

Nice.

For months now, supporters of the war in Iraq have trumpeted America’s apparent success in Iraq’s Anbar Province as a model for counterinsurgency operations.  With major fighting in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Qaim in the past, what had once been the most violent region of Iraq had--by the fall of 2007--become one of the most peaceful areas of the country.

It stayed that way until recently.  When a yet-to-be-named U.S. soldier was killed while on patrol in Anbar on Tuesday, he became the ninth American to die there in the past three and a half weeks.  This is neither random nor insignificant.

A while ago I became a father. This had a totally unexpected and disturbing effect: Every time I now see a suffering or dead child on the TV screen, I see my son - superimposed, like a double exposure.

I still watch. I feel I owe it to the dead children.

This is not a fun diary.  

Yesterday Laura Bush was at the White House giving a press conference on the tragedy in Myanmar. Everything appears on the level until the very end when the focus shifts to the details of Jenna's upcoming wedding plans.

The first lady appears to totally lose focus on the crisis at hand and is all smiles about the blooming flowers and limestone etc. and to be fair its also the fault of the press for allowing this highly insensitive shift to occur.

The question is - is this something similar to when she said "nobody suffers from the war more than we do (she and her husband)" and a window into the psyche of the Bush's? Or is this just a mental lapse? Was it the fault of the Press?

There have been 4,373 coalition deaths -- 4,065 Americans, two Australians, 176 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 22 Poles, three Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians -- in the war in Iraq as of May 2, 2008, according to a CNN count. { Graphical breakdown of casualties }. The list below is the names of the soldiers, Marines, airmen, sailors and Coast Guardsmen whose deaths have been reported by their country's governments. The list also includes seven employees of the U.S. Defense Department. At least 29,911 U.S. troops have been wounded in action, according to the Pentagon. View casualties in the war in Afghanistan.

Yesterday, amid all of the Mission Accomplished "nostalgia" and reports on the April death toll in Iraq hitting a new recent high of 50, one particular fatality in Afghanistan nearly escaped attention.  I did an item about it over at Editor & Publisher which did get widely linked, but I will now bring it to you here.  

Meanwhile, let's keep in mind that as of May 1, according to the Pentagon, at least 425 members of the U.S. military had died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan since late 2001.  Of those, the military reports 292 were killed by hostile action.

Now here's the latest casualty in Afghanistan:

The title of this post is a headline from an article in today's Daily Granma; searching Google News and Yahoo News turned up exactly one other news source (CBS News) reporting this item. Wouldn't want to disturb anyone; the "surge" is working, don't you know.

Around 75,000 US soldiers have been either killed, wounded or were evacuated during their participation in the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, admitted the Department of Defense on Monday.

According to the latest Pentagon report, the number of deaths in the two wars amount to 4,492, with 31,590 wounded and 38,631 troops that had to be sent away from the war scenes under the category of "non-hostile-related medical air transports."