US: Relatives of some soldiers feel their loved ones are simply not safe inIraq, reports Conor O'Clery.
Early on Sunday, the parents of US army private, Anthony D'Agostino were told that he had been injured in a missile attack on an American Chinook helicopter near Fallujah, Iraq, but had survived.
They were advised to sit by the telephone to await details of when he would come home. Instead, at midnight, a uniformed soldier arrived at the door of their home in Waterbury, Connecticut to say that he was dead.
The devastating knock on the door has become a daily occurrence for military families across the United States as the casualty toll mounts in Iraq.
Many of the stories are particularly poignant. Pte D'Agostino would have turned 21 tomorrow and had been given furlough to attend his birthday party. Another of the 16 soldiers killed in the helicopter crash, Sgt Ernest Bucklew of Fort Carson who worked as a supply clerk in Iraq, had got emergency leave to attend the funeral of his mother who had died suddenly in Pennsylvania, dealing a double blow to his wife Barbara, mother of two children, 8-year-old Joshua and 4-year-old Justin.
Fort Carson in Colorado, which has sent 12,000 troops to Iraq, its largest deployment since the second World War, has been particularly hard hit, with five fatalities from the attack on the Chinook. It has now lost 25 soldiers in Iraq, its heaviest combat casualty toll since Vietnam, all since US President George Bush declared the end of major combat action in Iraq on May 1st.
Oklahoma's Fort Sill lost six soldiers in Sunday's attack and Fort Hood in Texas three. Fort Hood has suffered 33 military fatalities since the beginning of the war in Iraq.
Fort Carson commander Col Michael Resty said morale among troops remained high but "unfortunately, we will probably have casualties in the future." The reaction of relatives of the soldiers killed in the attack on the helicopter have sometimes been tinged with bitterness.
"Tell Bush to go over there and fight for that oil," Thomas Wilson, uncle of staff sergeant Joe Wilson of Mississippi, told the New York Times.
Many of the 136 US soldiers killed and 1,285 injured in Iraq since the end of the conventional war are part-time soldiers - reservists and national guardsmen called up to supplement professional ranks.
A web site called Bring Them Home Now registers the complaints of military families, veterans, active duty personnel, reservists and others opposed to the war. One army reservist wife posted a message last week saying that her husband, a computer programmer ,was called up unexpectedly and sent to a support unit in Baghdad without formal military training.
"I fear for his life on a daily basis," said the woman, who has three children. "I feel terror is in my home everyday with the knowledge of knowing my husband is not safe." Prompted by a reporter, Mr Bush yesterday made his first direct comment on the casualties from Sunday's attack, the most deadly against the coalition forces since the end of major combat.
"I'm saddened, because I know a family hurts and there's a deep pain in somebody's heart," he said. He wanted to remind them that their sons died for a cause greater than themselves, the security of the United States." "We are at war," Mr Bush went on. "And it's essential that the people of America not forget the lessons of September the 11th, 2001. We are vulnerable to attack.
"The US must understand that and adjust to the new realities. And part of that reality is defeating terrorism and defeating the terrorists. And that's precisely what the loved ones who died on that day were doing." Mr Bush has not attended military funerals and the US Defence Department has prohibited media coverage of the return of the soldiers' flag-draped coffins in Ramstein, Germany, and Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
The 13-year-old ban was often waived before the Iraq war. Pictures of returning coffins helped turn American opinion against the Vietnam War.