I apologize in advance as this video will ruin your evening. A day in the life of American soldiers in Iraq.

The video is in the upper right hand corner. I could not watch it without crying. Maybe you can hold it together better then I did.

Apache Company was sent to Iraq in June 2006 for a 12-month rotation, which has since been extended to a 15-month tour. The soldiers are seen speaking openly about the effects of the endless combat and the grueling daily routine.

"We got grenades going off, we've got an IED blowing up your vehicle … and then, you are expected to go back in those four to six, four to five hours … and relax!" said Cpl. Joshua Lake, 2nd Infantry Division. "You just don't have time to do it. Your body never gets to come down. You're always on that heightened sense of alertness."

Until Monday night's report, Lake's mother had not heard her son's voice in a month.
"He's up for hours at a time. He can't sleep because his body is so tense when he comes back, and you know there's no way of laying down," Debbie Lake-McMahon told ABC News. "He said that he lays there and his body just trembles."

This story is so fucking heartbreaking that I have to believe that if the video were shown on the floor of the Senate it would immediately change the minds of those who still support this conflict and are filibustering to keep from voting to bring these damaged souls home. I mean how could it not? How inhuman must you be to not have this touch you?

The poor old woman and her dog, the cab driver slaughtered for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, the soldiers who can never get their bodies to calm down after pumping adrenaline for six hours straight. Not to mention the dead soldiers.

There is not much to like in this story, but if I had to choose something it would be this quote.

"Because we have people up there in Congress with the brain of a two year old who don't know what they are doing, they don't experience it. I challenge the President or whoever has us here for fifteen months to ride along..alongside me, I will do another fifteen months if he comes out here and rides along me every day for fifteen months, I will do another fifteen months they don't even have to pay me extra."

So these men just stay inside this meat grinder until September, while the Iraqi Parliament takes a month off, waiting for General Petraeus to give the thumbs up on the surge or the thumbs down. That is a criminal act and I want now more then ever for somebody to pay for it.

Fuck you Bush! Fuck you Cheney! Fuck you McCain! And fuck anybody who stands in the way of our troops coming home now.