TIKRIT, Iraq (Sept. 18) - Attackers ambushed a U.S. military patrol late Thursday, killing three American soldiers and wounding two on the outskirts of Saddam Hussein's hometown. The assault near Tikrit came hours after insurgents ambushed two U.S. military convoys with remote-controlled bombs, opening a three-hour gunbattle in a volatile city 50 miles west of Baghdad

BAGHDAD, Iraq (Sept. 21) - Three American soldiers were killed and 13 injured in a mortar attack and a bombing in the volatile region of central Iraq, the U.S. military reported Sunday. The deaths followed an assassination attempt against a member of Iraq's Governing Council.

Two soldiers from the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade were killed when mortars hit a U.S. base near the Abu Ghraib prison on the western outskirts of Baghdad about 10 p.m. Saturday. Thirteen other soldiers were injured in the attack. No prisoners were injured.

Shortly before the Abu Ghraib shelling, a soldier from the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment was killed when his Humvee was hit by a roadside bomb near Ramadi, about 60 miles west of the capital, the military said.

The deaths brought to 165 the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq since May 1 when President Bush declared major fighting was over. During the heavy fighting before then 138 soldiers died. The latest deaths brought to 302 the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq.

A Veterans Prayer

Dear God

It’s happening again

No, not in the jungles of Vietnam

But on the burning dunes and cities

Built on the oil rich Iraq sands

Each day

There’s more loss of life

Being sacrificed in that far off land

Young men and women bleeding on foreign soil

For what Washington, DC calls an American stand

Dear God,

Your old veterans hearts

Are beginning to break

For innocents committed for righteousness sake

That will sadly take a war to win,

Dear Lord…

I fear that our dark history

Is showing its ass again

How many of Liberty’s Son’s will it take?

To liberate a land that doesn’t care

While they rant and rave telling us

That they don’t want us there ......

To them human life is nothing more

Than a cheap, expendable,

commodity of war

Dear God,

Who do we, as Vietnam veterans believe in?

We know that the news media bold face lies,

We who fought in Vietnam remember

The double talk it took to keep that war alive

We understand what deceptions about

Coupled with misinformation and false body counts

Chemical agents that didn’t exist

Knowing now how hopeless it was to resist

Being told when and how to fight

Not even to fire when our enemy was in our sights

Expecting any moment that a sapper could pull a pin

That’s what we called terrorism then

And the death of one soldier was tragic and a sin

But now, as it was then, its becoming commonplace again

So God,

I’m asking you to please,

To wake up the comatose leaders of this great land

And to hold our warriors in the cleft of your mighty hand

To brand your wisdom on the hearts and minds

Of the powers that be

That they may truly see,

That our nation could not bear at all

Another fifty thousand names chiseled

Into yet another cold stone, Memorial Wall

Boon,

9/20/03