Samarra

You know, I had just been bumping along in life, thinking that Samarra had been taken care of long ago. You know, stability, integrity and beauty - to whack Leopold - throughout the land with Samarra being a troublesome, yet eager participant in the total balanced perfection that the US is bringing to the country. Plus, support the troops and other rah rah. But, shaken from my bumpy slumber it turns out that - alas! - Samarra isn't American at all. It's deer-hunting ground. Cheney would be proud of our boys here. Fucking "hajis," after all, right?

The gunfight by the Tigris River was over. It was time to retrieve the bodies.

Staff Sgt. Cortez Powell looked at the shredded jaw of a dead man whom he'd shot in the face when insurgents ambushed an American patrol in a blind of reeds. Powell's M4 assault rifle had jammed, so he'd grabbed the pump-action shotgun that he kept slung over his shoulders and pulled the trigger.

Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down, pulled two of the insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud.

"Strap those motherf-----s to the hood like a deer," said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark.

The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of a Humvee and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along.

Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers...

... Pena was up on the schoolhouse roof manning the same .50-caliber machine gun. He didn't say a word about the man he'd killed. As he stared at a patch of earth in front of him, at Samarra and its wreckage, he couldn't contain his frustration.

"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn't?" Pena asked. "Because there is no f------ reason."

Oh, and look at this too: "tribal," infiltration, no government, danger. Good excuses, all.

Plus this on October 2004 optimism about Samarra.

Look, the Americans have no clue. This isn't flying by the seat of the pants. They've long been torn to shreds, and we have a batch of incompetents hanging off of each thread in a sandstorm. There's no "gravitas" here, no "realism. This is just plain insanity, and we have a government that also can't wait until 2008.