“‘It’s like a game of Russian roulette,’ said one of my friends whose son is serving in Iraq. ‘Every day we wonder if our luck will hold out, or if today is the day we take the hit.’ ” —AlterNet

One thing I have recently noticed is that US news sources reporting on the death often say that a vehicle ‘ran into a roadside bomb’ or something similar. To me, this suggests accidentally hitting a buried hazard along the lines of a landmine left over from hostilities, while in reality we are talking about a deliberate attack by resistance fighters who have placed the device and I presume are waiting in the vicinity to detonate it as a US convoy passes. Similarly, when a helicopter or aircraft goes down, one has to get into the heart of the story for confirmation that it had been fired upon. Is this an unconscious softpedaling of the daily enmity the US faces? Reading European coverage of the same incidents, words are far less minced.

Related: US Soldiers’ Suicide Rate is Up in Iraq:

“Suicide has become such a pressing issue that the Army sent an assessment team to Iraq late last year to see if anything more could be done to prevent troops from killing themselves. The Army also began offering more counseling to returning troops after several soldiers at Fort Bragg, N.C., killed their wives and themselves after returning home from the war.

Winkenwerder said the military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers, he said.

That’s a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000, Winkenwerder said. In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 10.9 per 100,000.

The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” —Yahoo!