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Black Hawk Down In Tal Afar
A US military helicopter carrying 12 people has crashed in Iraq, with all those on board being killed.The UH-60 Blackhawk crashed about seven miles east of Tal Afar. The US military announced, records showed that eight passengers and four crewmembers were on board.
The Blackhawk was part of a two-helicopter team moving between bases when communications were lost, the military said. A search and rescue operation was immediately launched and the helicopter was found at about noon on Sunday, the military added.
● Tal Afar
«« click on pic to enlarge
The following A 4/101 men are six of the seventeen
soldiers killed 11/15/03 when two 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters crashed in Mosul, Iraq while serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom
● Fallujah 3 Marines killed by small arms fire
● Baghdad 2 Marines killed by an IED
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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How many more? This has been a very deadly week for our men and women in Iraq. Out of Iraq NOW!!!
These senseless losses are mindnumbing.
Why are these young men and women still sent into harms way for an illegal war which is already lost!
They volunteered and now they are lost.
I still hold hope that more will begin to oppose from within.
Is there something wrong with the design of this helicopter? Or is it the training? I remember seeing a lot of death in Vietnam, but not helicopter crashes. The first helicopter crashes I can remember were in the Iran hostage rescue attempt. Why are they so unsafe?
With as much as Black Hawks are used to fly troops and command and the wounded they are in the air probably a lot more than any of us fathom here on peaceful U.S. soil. Add to that the crews may be sleep deprived and their crew chiefs may be sleep deprived and that parts may not be replaced when they need to be because they don’t have what they need and the sand in Iraq is total hell on helicopters and you have a recipe for helicopters going down. Can’t speak for Vietnam, I was only a baby then. Common folk such as us though have no idea how impossible the sand over there is on our helicopters and the magic that the crew chiefs preform right now keeping these birds flying. Maybe someday we will hear all the stories but right now they are working their asses off trying to save their guys and bitching just doesn’t seem to fit into the day at the moment!
help us all understand how hard the desert environment is on our helicopters.http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/issues/2005/Feb/Armys_War.htm
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An RPG downed the Black Hawk heli in Mogadishu, just armed bandits, no professional army. Same risk with Chinook helis in Iraq and Afghanistan carrying troops, see the British losses in Iraq and the deaths of U.S. Seals in Kunar province, Afghanistan.
In addition as Militarytracy has pointed out, the helis require a high level of maintenance with lots of down time. Yesterday’s diary was a scream by a pilot or maintenance engineer who will quit his job of bending the safety regulations to keep flying with planes/helis not up to par with readiness.
● UH-60 Black Hawk Design & Maintenance
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
air are working 12 on and 12 off for a year or more at a time. The Marine pilot rant is a good rant, he isn’t in Iraq though and appears to be flying cargo. His crew chiefs are over worked all to hell and back but the crew chiefs in Iraq are doing it all under fire everyday too. I don’t know how any of these people are going to “calm down” in any sort of short period of time when they get home. People just don’t go sleep deprived in fear of their life and feeling like everything concerning their buddies and fellow soldiers is life and death also and not have that leave a scar on them.
The Iraq War vet that drove with me to Crawford, Scott was a Apache helicopter mechanic. He told me his base was bombed 800 times in the 15 months he was there. How does anyone recover from that day in and day out bombing? How does one try to work on helicopters in that environment?
Bill Maher patting our troops on the back and talking about how wonderful they are I want to kick him hard. Yes they are but they can’t keep this up! No human being can keep this up day in and day out and be sane by cultured modern day society standards…..they have reached an animalistic state of survival that the rest of us have worked very hard to get away from and that we consider loathsome. Once that switch has been flipped on it doesn’t flip right off and it can be flipped on again much more easily. I remember a retired Army chaplain telling me that when he returned home from Vietnam and was eating potato chips in front of his wife and two boys he was holding the bag and shoveling the stuff into his mouth and eating it like a dog while his three family members stood there staring at him like he had lost his mind, he had definitely lost his “manners”.
I do not know if I have a right to make a comment here or not; however, WAR is not a good thing. ((we all know this as a given))) STRESSORS of said WAR are from many things. It can be just one thing or it may be a combination of many.
What is PTSD? It is from anything that has not been a norm for someone that has the trauma that has gone thru this trauma. If we were raised to do this shit on a daily basis, we wouldn’t not think one thing about it, but we are humans and not robots, so as humans we do not do things in such a way, that which is being ordered we do in the battlefield. Oh I know, we are talking war herre..but…….. I do not care what bootcamp or A school or professional training you did in the military, this is just not normal behavior for humans to have to endure. The PTSD problem is already showing up on the battlefield as we speak. This is and will be a very big problem for the commanders sitting back drinking their coffee and wondering why shit don’t get done..while they the slaves on the battlefield don’t even have time to eat a meal. DAMN then all to HELL! They are doing such nonsensable things to our men and women there that isn’t even humane! Damn them to hell!!!!!
The leaders in said country is not even leading by design let along giving or setting good standards/examples. I have many questions I would love to ask on many topics of said war/wars in this campaign. I will probably never get any answers, if I do they probably will not get answered in the detail I want them anyhow.
We have to support the troops! This is not supporting them. we have to get better at doing our job. Even the products sent to keep them safe is not good enough any longer.
Good diary, Oui. Thanks Tracy for your input. As a community, we have to become stronger than this government we have or wished we had to get the job completed. It is my firm belief that we need to withdraw from this campaign and do it within given time or else we will take over our government, period..It is time we gave time limits for getting the job done and not leave it hanging open-ended for debate! I am seriously worried about/for our military..very worried! Have you ever wondered if, since this is a war, do we have nay men/women being taken now as POW”S or MIA’S? After all seems like kidnapping is running wild over there. Just asking…..none have been reported except one early on and still no word on him either.
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Anywhere and anytime BrendaStewart … to express our grief for the needless suffering wrought by the neocon intervention in Iraq and its occupation.
As I have expressed long and often, Iraq is a complete failure of leadership in the field, the Pentagon and the White House. Political motives to wage a war of choice will cause failure by our soldiers doing the hard work, killing, dying, getting wounded in body and mind. PTSD is on the increase when commanders have troops stretched too thin and insanity replaces sanity in warfare.
Abu Ghraib – Fallujah – Tal Afar – Euphrates Valley
The families of our Marines and soldiers will be suffering to cope with a wounded warrior for many years. War is hell, not a political tool of some party on the Hill.
IMPEACH them all!
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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BAGHDAD (SF Chronicle/AP) ½ hour ago — Insurgents exploded a suicide car bomb and launched two mortar shells at Iraq’s Interior Ministry during National Police Day celebrations, killing 21 people and injuring 24, police said.
An Internet statement by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the name of his al-Qaida in Iraq terrorist group rebuked Sunni Arabs for taking part in last month’s parliamentary elections, saying they had “thrown a rope” to save U.S. policy.
U.S. military have said eight U.S. troops and four American civilians died aboard a U.S. Army Black Hawk helicopter that crashed late Saturday in northern Iraq. The military initially said only that there were eight passengers and four crewmembers aboard.
With the latest military deaths, at least 2,207 U.S. service members have died since the war started in 2003, according to an Associated Press count.
Al-Zawahri statement on Afghanistan and U.S. Defeat in Iraq
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Purple Finger, High Voter Turnout ::
One Month Later Still No Election Result!
Senior party member of the Sunni Arab Iraqi Accordance Front, Adnan al-Dulaimi, in talks with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani during a meeting at the Presidential Building, in the secure ‘green zone’ in Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Dulaimi and Talabani met to discuss a more inclusive coalition government after the Dec. 15 parliamentary elections.
An Iraqi man looks at posters showing Al-Qaeda frontman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Baghdad. Zarqawi, said in an audio tape put onto the Internet that rockets had been fired at Israel from Lebanon last month "on the instructions" of the network's overall chief Osama bin Laden. AFP/Sabah Arar
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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Read my diary ::
“All I ever wanted to be was a foreign correspondent,” Carroll wrote last year in the American Journalism Review. “It seemed the right time to try to make it happen.”
KIDNAPPED: Freelance reporter
Jill Carroll has worked in Iraq
since 2003. Delphine Minoui
Carroll, a 28-year-old freelancer for The Christian Science Monitor, was kidnapped Saturday in Baghdad, when gunmen ambushed her car and killed her translator. She had been on her way to meet a Sunni Arab official in one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods.
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
▼ ▼ ▼ MY DIARY
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By Larry B. Stammer, Times Staff Writer
In a statement sent to Bush and Congress, Catholic prelates avoid the word “withdrawal,” but say American troops should leave “sooner than later.”
Declaring that the United States was at a crossroads in Iraq, the nation’s Roman Catholic bishops said the time had come to withdraw U.S. troops as fast as responsibly possible and to hand control of the country to Iraqis.
“Our nation’s military forces should remain in Iraq only as long as it takes for a responsible transition, leaving sooner than later,” said Bishop Thomas G. Wenski of Orlando, Fla., speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
USCCB
“Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
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