LATEST U.S. CASUALTY REPORT FROM IRAQ

The mainstream media has all but given up on reporting about casualties of U.S. troops in Iraq and so part of the mission of my blog is to bring my readers information on these brave young warriors who have sacrificed so much in this needless war.

Here is the latest casaulty report from Iraq:

Casualty Reports:Richard Setterstrom. 22, was blown up along a road south of Fallujah last year. His back aches, his joints are arthritic and he wears a hearing aid in his left ear. Setterstrom was first injured Dec. 12, 2005, while he and fellow members of 3rd Battalion 5th Marines were clearing houses of enemy combatants through a section of Fallujah. Setterstrom was pounding a dwelling with .50-caliber rounds when something inside exploded. A piece of shrapnel from the explosion lodged just above his right knee.“It felt like someone hit me in the kneecap with a baseball,” Setterstrom said. The piece of shrapnel remains in his leg.Setterstrom was the victim of another explosion during his second tour in Iraq, just five months after his first injury. His battalion was patrolling a major thoroughfare near the embattled city of Fallujah.Setterstrom drove a Humvee in a convoy that encountered daily IED attacks. Setterstrom said they knew who was making the IEDs: a Jordanian who was hired by the insurgency to kill as many Marines as possible. The explosion shook the ground. Fortunately for Setterstrom and his passenger, the Humvee took the brunt of the blast. But the force of the explosion beat up the two men badly. The blast tore a joint in his shoulder, pulled his spine and gave him a serious concussion.“My brain swelled up a little bit,” he said.Setterstrom still gets headaches and feels pain in his joints throughout his body as a result of the injuries suffered in the attack.

Matthew Zajack lost a leg to a roadside bomb and was sent home early. Zajack has been recovering in Texas, but was flown to Colorado Springs to greet his buddies at the end of their tour.

Marine Bjorn Steinmo, 21, said he is happy to see 2008 after being given a second chance at life this fall when he was shot in the face while on duty in Iraq. A prosthetic jaw, a few replacement teeth and some hearing loss will be the only permanent physical damage caused by a sniper's bullet that entered his right nostril and exited behind the left ear without striking his brain or a major blood vessel. On July 22, Steinmo was sitting on a roof in front of a chin-high wall in Karma, a town of about 75,000 people, nine miles outside Fallujah, when the sniper's bullet hit him. He said he has undergone four surgeries without any infections or complications. The only major surgery remaining is to his shattered jaw. Despite having a special reconstructive bar pinned to his face this fall, the jaw bone did not regenerate properly. In January, doctors will cut out a large piece of the left side, including the joint, and install the prosthetic replacement.