Someone At the Baltimore Sun Must Be Reading My Blog

From The Baltimore Sun:

In a horrifying way, the explosion that tore apart the giant tent that served as a dining hall at an American military base near Mosul, Iraq, was neither unusual nor unexpected.

Soldiers at Forward Operating Base Marez south of Mosul had already described in e-mails to their families their unease about the safety of the dining hall -- a long, high tent pitched atop a concrete pad -- and the ability of Iraqi insurgents to target the base.

Easter Sunday was particularly bad, as Adam Szafarn, a 23-year-old specialist with the Maine National Guard, told his family.

"There was just round after round after round," his mother, Sheila Szafarn, said Tuesday in a telephone interview from South Portland, Maine, recall ing that her son and other soldiers spent much of that day in concrete bomb shelters. "They couldn't go anywhere. They were just riding it out."

Her son e-mailed her after Tuesday's attack to say he was safe, but his mother remembered earlier messages about the dining tent. "He doesn't like going to the dining hall, because of the lack of safety," she said. "It's a soft building."

Thanks to a plentiful supply of mortars and rocket-propelled grenades and a lack of American troops to patrol the perimeter of forward bases, Iraqi insurgents are able to strike with relative ease.

Mortars rained down on the chow hall more than 30 times this year, according to a report by the Richmond Times-Dispatch , which has a reporter embedded with soldiers there. One round killed a soldier last summer as she scrambled for cover, the paper's Web site said.

Just hours before the mess hall blast, a soldier from a Virginia National Guard unit was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds she suffered in a mortar attack in October targeting another part of the base.

Riggs, the retired Army general, said the attack precisely on a mess hall at lunch time would likely indicate more than luck. Perhaps a sympathizer inside the base was able to "walk off" the distance to the mess hall. "That almost has to be a physical survey," he said.

While soldiers were caring for the dead and wounded Tuesday at Marez, workers down a dusty road at the base were constructing a new steel and concrete chow hall for the soldiers.

The only difference is that this article goes on to say that more man power is needed to protect the bases and root out those who are attacking them. I agree. Like I always say, the quickest way to end this war is to reinstate the draft, for sending all of our young men and women over to Iraq will either ensure a victory, or it will scare America so much that we will be forced to completely pull out.