Before I feel too sorry for them, I'd like to know if it's true that some 70% of our troops actually voted to keep the guy in office who left them in this pitiful situation.
I started hearing months ago about Humvees without armor plate, trucks that don't run, radios that don't work and guns without bullets.
It had to be a temporary glitch, I said to myself when I heard about these omissions way back in April. Surely the great minds of the military brass would have figured out right away that they needed to change the way they were supplying the troops.
One of those stories in April -- from United Press International -- cited a report that said 20 percent of the U.S. troops killed in Iraq "might have lived had there been more armored, heavier vehicles available to them."
And yet the stories persisted. Sunday's New York Times says the problem "is extensive," and that the National Guard and Reserves are particularly affected.
This week, when I went online, good old Google came up with more than 34,000 hits -- mostly new -- on G.I.s lacking armor.
There was the story in the Oct. 25 issue of Time magazine about young soldiers -- a young woman and a young man -- phoning their parents, begging them to get in touch with Congress for help getting the life-saving supplies they need.
They used phrases like "suicide mission" to describe their daily lives. The worst part of that story was the comment that military officials planned "an investigation to determine whether any of the soldiers violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice" by asking their parents for help.
