We're the Hammer now

Now that Tom Delay (The Hammer) is gone, we should, every day, hammer into people the tragedy that is Iraq. One person who does this is Mark from Ireland (on my blog roll on the right). Today, from Daily Kos:

Tens of thousands of Americans, their familles, their friends. We know that over 2,300 will never come home. Another 16,000 or more are physically injured, many severely. Lost limbs, severed spinal cords, massive head trauma, they are blinded, broken, and shattered. And the number of dead and injured Iraqis is possibly ten times greater. (ed. see my post below) Many of these people will undergo more discomfort and hardship for the rest of their lives simply waking up and getting out of bed than most us will encounter in what we call a 'day from hell'.

An estimated fifty-thousand Americans will suffer Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The sensorium of war will furnish the survivors with a lifetime's supply of guilt, delicately filed between reel after reel of ghastly snapshots recorded by the senses and replayed endlessly in the virtual cinema of the Mind. It may manifest itself as anxiety, chronic depression, substance abuse, or conduct disorders. These 'lucky' survivors will struggle with recurring images, sounds, and smells of dead men, women, and children. Even flashbacks of the living can haunt; the memory of an abandoned toddler spied through a smoking gun turret, bloody and wailing in a bullet chipped alley, too young to understand and too helpless to cope, can break a man or woman years later. (emphasis added)