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Something I can't understand is that if we are willing to fight this war, then why is the American public coddled and spoon fed only "sanitary" images of the war? You have to look pretty hard on the Web to find photos like these, and they are usually on foreign or international news sites - not US news outlets.

We are the most violent, gun-toting, death loving nation on the planet. And yet when it is time for the real thing to happen, the real mass casualties of a war, with body parts flying, and people dying horrible deaths, we somehow turn it off. I went into the post office the other day and the TV behind the counter that always has CNN on was suddenly switched to the Cooking Channel. Why? (The same thing was true of Airport TVs after 9/11) Because we can not face the horror of what we are doing? If we are really liberating the Iraqi people why can't we be allowed to see it?

Here are some parts of a news story filed by Mark Franchetti of the Sunday Times of London (this is from fighting in Nasirya):

"Some 15 vehicles, including a minivan and a couple of trucks, blocked the road. They were riddled with bullet holes. Some had caught fire and turned into piles of black twisted metal. Others were still burning.

Amid the wreckage I counted 12 dead civilians, lying in the road or in nearby ditches. All had been trying to leave this southern town overnight, probably for fear of being killed by US helicopter attacks and heavy artillery.

Their mistake had been to flee over a bridge that is crucial to the coalition's supply lines and to run into a group of shell-shocked young American marines with orders to shoot anything that moved.

One man's body was still in flames. It gave out a hissing sound. Tucked away in his breast pocket, thick wads of banknotes were turning to ashes. His savings, perhaps.

Down the road, a little girl, no older than five and dressed in a pretty orange and gold dress, lay dead in a ditch next to the body of a man who may have been her father. Half his head was missing.

Nearby, in a battered old Volga, peppered with ammunition holes, an Iraqi woman _ perhaps the girl's mother _ was dead, slumped in the back seat. A US Abrams tank nicknamed Ghetto Fabulous drove past the bodies."

And this:

""They are f****** dead, they are dead. Oh my God. Get in there. Get in there now and pull them out," shouted a gunner in a state verging on hysterical.

There was panic and confusion as a group of young marines, shouting and cursing orders at one another, pulled out a maimed body.

Two men struggled to lift the body on a stretcher and into the back of a Hummer, but it would not fit inside, so the stretcher remained almost upright, the dead man's leg, partly blown away, dangling in the air.

"We shouldn't be here," said Lieutenant Campbell Kane, 25, who was born in Northern Ireland. "We can't hold this. They are trying to suck us into the city and we haven't got enough ass up here to sustain this. We need more tanks, more helicopters."

Closer to the destroyed AAV, another young marine was transfixed with fear and kept repeating: "Oh my God, I can't believe this. Did you see his leg? It was blown off. It was blown off."

The whole article can be read here. This is the reality of war. Mutilation, POWs, MIAs, orphans, civilians killed in bunches, nervous wreck soldiers, etc. America should know it - we should see it. Maybe if we did we wouldn't be so quick to pull the trigger the next time.