Flag-draped coffins of US casualties from Iraq aboard cargo plane (AP)
By host Tom Ashbrook.
Four thousand. The number of U.S. military dead, hit yesterday in Baghdad. Four thousand.
It's not a surprise. It's not a shock. We knew it was coming. It's not nearly as big as the number of nearly 30,000 U.S. wounded or the number of Iraqi casualties. But it's here.
And it is a real milestone. A hard, cold number. A marker of what so many men and women in uniform have sacrificed -- and, in this war, of what so many Americans have not sacrificed.
This hour, On Point: honoring, weighing, acknowledging 4,000 Americans dead in Iraq.
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Tom Bowman, Pentagon correspondent for NPR
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Alissa Rubin, Deputy Baghdad Bureau Chief for the New York Times
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Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic & International Studies
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Rosemary Palmer, mother of Lance Corporal Augie Schraeder who was serving in the Marine reserves when he was killed on August 3rd, 2005 and co-founder of Families of the Fallen for Change
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Ann Scott Tyson, Military and Pentagon correspondent for the Washington Post
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Paul Kane, a Marine reservist, decorated combat veteran of Iraq and Harvard University's Belfer Center.
