Memorial Day

Unfortunately, this is the kind of Memorial Day we don't want to have. The idea of today's holiday is to honor those who have given their lives in service to the country. Some might say in defense of the country, and to a large extent, I agree, but it's not obvious in all of our wars--including our current one--exactly how the country is being defended. Which gets us back to why this is an uncomfortable Memorial Day--we're very likely to be honoring a few individuals by the end of the day who were still serving their country at the beginning of it.

Here's the latest count of the dead in Iraq, according to icasualties.org:

US: 3,455

UK: 149

Other: 127

TOTAL: 3,731

Those numbers are only military deaths, of course, and they don't count whatever the number of Iraqis who have been killed so far.

I can't give you a complete number of the US wounded, unfortunately, because icasualties gets the updated figures for its month-by-month chart from the Department of Defense on the first and last weeks of the month. The number as of this writing is 25,242, but May of this year only has 116 wounded--somehow I have a feeling that's going to go up.

Let's remember those who are sacrificing for us as I write this and you read it, and let's see what we can do about allowing them to bring their time of sacrifice to an end.