More “Collateral Damage”

From FoxNews.com:

A young life changed forever by Iraq’s war

BAGHDAD —  She was a beautiful, round-faced little girl with large, coal-black eyes and an instant smile. Two years later, the 3-year-old is blind and scarred, her mother is dead and her father’s new wife can’t cope with caring for her.

Shams, whose name in Arabic means “sun,” is among tens of thousands of Iraqis for whom the war may never end. Her suffering and those of so many others will linger long after the conflict ends.

Shams’ young life changed on Nov. 23, 2006, when a car bomb exploded near her father’s pickup as he was driving his family _ his wife, two sons and the daughter _ home after a visit to his wife’s parents in the Shiite district of Sadr City.

The blast engulfed their car in flames. Shams and her mother, who was fatally injured in the blast, were thrown from the backseat into street. Her father, Husham Fadhil, tried to douse the flames on his wife’s clothing.

But there was little he could do for his 1-year-old daughter, lying face down next to her dying mother.

“I was totally preoccupied with putting out the flames which were burning my wife’s body,” Fadhil, 32, said. “Then, I lifted Shams and saw her face covered with blood. I thought that they were caused by minor injuries that would heal. Later, I learned that the blood was coming from her badly injured eyes.”

Um, yeah, what I said just yesterday. From The War at Home, about the deaths of four Korean women and girls from a fighter jet crash in a San Diego suburb:

When we talk of war and supporting our troops, it is easy to think only of the presumably willing combatants. And though their sacrifices and suffering may indeed prove enormous, they are not the only players: in every war, or even in the buildup of a military, there are casualties of women and children and the elderly of both sexes, who never signed up to risk the horrors that befell them.

I neglected to mention that young, widowed husbands and entire networks of grieving relatives are also the casualties of militarization and war.