And the 'magnetic ribbon', till they fall off, crowd could care less, especially the 'purple heart bandages' comedians, the whole political (T) party of, as they ignore their own sacrifice while whining for tax cuts instead of demanding the decades long needs of funding the Veterans Administration for the results of their wars of choice. They cover that silence of demand by blaming the VA instead of looking in the mirror, even the brother and sister vets who follow the ideology, or lack of, of that once political party!!
What happened to them in Sangin district of Helmand province shows the sacrifices in a campaign aimed at crippling the Taliban in a stronghold and helping extricate the U.S. from a decadelong war.
Lance Cpl. Juan Dominguez, 26, left, practices using a biometric prosthetic arm with Todd Love, also from Camp Pendleton, at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. (Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times)
January 22, 2011 - Marines tell of snipers who fire from "murder holes" cut into mud-walled compounds. Fighters who lie in wait in trenches dug around rough farmhouses clustered together for protection. Farmers who seem to tip the Taliban to the outsiders' every movement , often with signals that sound like birdcalls.
When the Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, deployed to the Sangin district of Afghanistan's Helmand province in late September, the British soldiers who had preceded them warned the Americans that the Taliban would be waiting nearly everywhere for a chance to kill them.
But the Marines, ordered to be more aggressive than the British had been, quickly learned that the Taliban wasn't simply waiting.
In Sangin, the Taliban was coming after them.
In four years there, the British had lost more than 100 soldiers, about a third of all their nation's losses in the war.
In four months, 24 Marines with the Camp Pendleton-based Three-Five have been killed.
More than 140 others have been wounded, some of them catastrophically, losing limbs and the futures they had imagined for themselves.
The Marines' families have been left devastated, or dreading the knock on the door.
"We are a brokenhearted but proud family," Marine Lt. Gen. John Kelly said. He spoke not only of the battalion: His son 1st Lt. Robert Kelly was killed leading a patrol in Sangin.
The Three-Five had drawn a daunting task: Push into areas where the British had not gone, areas where Taliban dominance was uncontested, areas where the opium poppy crop whose profits help fuel the insurgency is grown, areas where bomb makers lash together explosives to kill and terrorize in Sangin and neighboring Kandahar province. {continued}
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