Picture this all in your mind from the comforts of your homes:

sitting on your couches and watching CNN. Chew on those Big Macs and enjoy those sunday Football games while enjoying a beer. Watching your kids play out in the back yard with the swimming pool or tree swing. Your wife is cooking you your favorite meal while your friends come over to visit.

And you sleep soundly at night, unafraid.

Now picture this:

wake up at around 4 am in the moring to the comforting sounds of an explosion. It could be a mortar attack where you live, or a roadside bomb. Carry an assault rifle with bullets where ever you may go, for your own protection. Sometimes, an air raid siren will go off, signaling you to jump into the nearest concrete bunker to protect your fragile life from the dropping metal aiming hellwards, towards you. Your car is a seven ton behemoth of armor and glass, and drives with the skills of a three-wheeled Ford Pinto, with some machine gun sticking out of the top. Your average day time temperature ranges 100 degrees (or 39 for you metric people out there) and the A/C works... sometimes. Sometimes you hear the chatter of an AK-47, hitting your vehicle, watch as the bulletproof glass mushrooms from impact, the metal clanging from the richochets. Don't eat the local food, don't drink the local water, and whatever you do, don't trust the locals. They only clean your bathrooms, fill up your showers, cook your food, and fill up your generators. Watch a ceremony where two people are represented by a pair of boots, a rifle, a helmet, and a pair of dog tags, and know that those men are now dead. Maybe they had children. Maybe they had wives. You'll never know, because you never knew them, and now it's too late, you never will. They are now a growing statistic that CNN displays every day.

Do you look at that number? It's around 3,400.

10/04/2007