Purple Hearts: horrors of the war in online NYT slideshow

Looking at today's NY Times, my heart was broken open.  There is a new and devastating exhibition of photographs called ``Purple Hearts'' opening in NYC by the photographer Nina Berman.  

To see these photos is to deepen the disgust with today's talk from our elders.

With inapt and inept contrasts of Iraq with Vietnam.

With news that we cannot send armored vehicles quickly enough.

With an unrolling of an ad campaign by a former flack who doesn't know the name of the soldier he is using as a prop to shill this horrific conflict.

We must have the Senate and House see these pictures and show them to the world.    

Go to the slide show.  I am most devastated by the sixth picture.

There is a beautiful bride on the day of her wedding, bedecked in her white gown, he in his formal marine gear.  

Then look at him.

He is missing his ears, his hair, most of his nose. He has been horribly burned.  

There is twenty year old Adam Zaremba, who lost his leg from a mine.

Twenty three year old Alan Jermaine Lewis, who lost both legs to a mine.

Jeremy Feldbush, 24, left blind and brain damaged by mortar attacks.  

Joseph Mosner, 35, had his face severely burned and scalp burned off in a bomb explosion.

Robert Acosta, 20, lost arm and leg to an ambush outside Baghdad.

Sam Ross, left blind and with one less leg, age 20, from a bomb.

We know the numbers at DKos.  These are but a few.

But to look at these harrowed faces, these lives transformed, to know that there are 3700 coffins that needn't be there but from this war of choice-this is the reminder in stark visceral terms that we must end this occupation of a distant land.  

To see these pictures you cannot but gag gag at the claims from Mitt Romney that his sons are serving the country by campaigning for him.

To see these pictures is to know that the claims of the Brookings scholars and politicians that it is working is so much empty rhetoric.  

John Kerry famously said

“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam -– How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

These lives lost and ruined, these young men and women, they are all our sons and daughters, and they have served our country in good faith, betrayed by the elders for whatever complex of greed, ideology and naivity propelled them here.  

We can honor them best by ensuring that less of them suffer this fate.

Call the armed services committees and ask them to hear from Nina Berman, and to see her photos, and to hear from some of the young men and women she photographed.

Senate: 1-202-224-3871
House: 1-202-225-4151