F is for five

The pentagon announced today that there have been five more American fatalities in Iraq.
How do we measure the value of even one life?
Is it a matter of gender, ethnicity, or just what?
Those who have not experienced the death of a son, daughter, or other one they have loved may have understood with their intellect, or maybe their heart,but most unlikely they could have integrated the two.
Are American lives the only lives which will count for us if we define ourselves as loyal Americans?
I don't think so.
If one of us has been tortured, and endured incredible pain and hardship, will his heroic tribulations enhance his compassion or blunt it. By all views a heroic man guaged by what he has endured John Mc Cain appeares to me to have been captured , NOT LIBERATED BY IT.
6ur Surge has been a failure if not a catastrophe.
I believe that John McCain, a genuine Amerian hero in the face of those extraordinary hardships he endured as a prisoner of war, has lost a great deal in his sacrifice for his country-including the ability to lead us wisely.
In my estimation,as a doctor,as a psychiatrist,and as
myself a survivor of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, McCain has lost his sense of proportion. His world
now is peopled by his demons.
He seems now to function with the intense fixity of an Ahab. Iraq and a vison of revenge obsess him.
It is truly sad- his functioning now, is ossified by old hurts, and advancing years. I hope we,as a nation, will be too mature, and too compassionate to blindly follow him off the cliff into an absyss beyond.
Following his win in South Carolina he vowed,while flailing his arms in a frightening portrayal of democrat Dean at his most extreme, to pursue Osama to Afghanistan, and personally to eliminate him. He appeared to be offering to do so with his bare hands. Should he achieve that grandiose goal he would only succeed in sullying his hands, and as well as an unforgiving heart and our National honor.

Dr. Sox