May 25 2010

US Soldiers Killed in Action Since Obama’s Inauguration

Casualties1

Casualties2

Casualties3

Casualties4

Casualties5

Casualties6

And on the previous page were the names of Pvt. Grant A. Cotting and Spc. Matthew M. Pollini, the first and second American soldiers killed in action after the inauguration of Barack Obama.

Cotting and Pollini

Twenty-one-year-old Spc. Matthew Pollini was serving with the 772nd Military Police Company, an Army National Guard unit from Taunton. Flags flew at half-staff in Rockland and the town posted a memorial notice.

Erica Pollini told The Patriot Ledger of Quincy her brother “was a talented, loyal person” who joined the National Guard two or three years ago. She said his unit was activated last fall and he was due home in October. Joseph Pollini told WBZ-TV his older brother “was a hero, a hands-down hero,” and said he followed his brother into the same Guard unit, a dream of service they shared.

Pollini’s 20-year-old wife Sarah, whom he married Dec. 22, told The Patriot Ledger, “we had lots of plans.”

3 comments

  1. And I know that many more American soldiers were killed in action during the administratrion of George W. Bush, and more than 1,000,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians have also perished in our senseless wars.

  2. I have been reading a 19th century history of the Renaissance in Italy by Jacob Burckhardt, and in one of his notes about mercenary generals (Condottieri) he says…

    The combat was often a mere sham-fight, in which the enemy was forced to withdraw by harmless manoeuvres. The object of the combatants was to avoid blood-shed, at worst to make prisoners with a view to ransom. According to Macchiavelli, the Florentines lost in a great battle in 1440 one man only.

    But now all the numbers quickly become unthinkable, and although it’s common enough to admit the incomprehensibility of 6,000,000 murders during the Jewish Holocaust or our own annihilation of 1,000,000 lives in Iraq, it’s equally impossible to understand much smaller numbers like 600, approximately the number of our brave soldiers who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since Obama swore his oath of office January 20, 2009.

    For example, Spc Pollini’s wife says “we had lots of plans,” and that’s simple enough to remember, but anyone who tries to encompass one simple fact about each one of 600 US soldiers in one act of consciousness will immediately realize the impossibility of accomplishing any such thing, and we really aren’t much more adept at comprehending the human enormity of war in our time than a nation of parakeets, whose numerical intelligence is apparently limited to the concepts of one, two, and many.  

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