http://www.madison.com/tct/opinion/column/zaleski/index.php?ntid=11274Sixteen months have passed since Kirk Straseskie of Beaver Dam, a 23-year-old U.S. Marine infantry sergeant, became the first Wisconsin fatality in the Iraq war.
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Since then, 20 other Wisconsin soldiers have died in Iraq, the most recent being 21-year-old Marine Cpl. Adrian Soltau of Milwaukee, who was killed in an explosion Sept. 13. And while all those deaths were duly noted in the media, one gets the sense that many Americans have grown indifferent to what's happening in that chaotic region. Either that, or they don't want to face the unsettling possibility that, 30 years after Vietnam, we're once again trapped in a no-win situation.
John Straseskie, the father of Kirk Straseskie, senses it, too.
"I don't think Bush has a clue what he's doing over there," the 52-year-old retired Beaver Dam resident said in a phone interview this week.And Straseskie suspects things will just continue to deteriorate because, he maintains, the president and his advisers can't seem to comprehend one simple fact.
"Anytime you have guerrilla-type warfare going on, you kill a lot of innocent people - and that just feeds the guerillas," he says. "And there's gonna come a time when we're running with our tails tucked between our legs just to get out of there."