So we’re doing this now.

God damned body counts.

Well of course we are.

OK, anybody still think this isn’t Vietnam 2.0?

If so, kindly pick out favorite firearm (and I’m sure you have dozens), jam it down your windpipe ‘til the hammer tickles your uvula, and pull the trigger. Because you, Pooky, are just way, WAY too stupid to live and need to get the fuck off my planet with all deliberate speed.

Unfamiliar with the topic?

I’ll make it easy.

See if you can spot any basic difference between this story, ripped from today’s headlines, with emphasis added by me.

Enemy Body Counts Revived
U.S. Is Citing Tolls to Show Success in Iraq
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, October 24, 2005

Eager to demonstrate success in Iraq, the U.S. military has abandoned its previous refusal to publicize enemy body counts and now cites such numbers periodically to show the impact of some counterinsurgency operations.

The revival of body counts, a practice discredited during the Vietnam War, has apparently come without formal guidance from the Pentagon's leadership. Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said they knew of no written directive detailing the circumstances under which such figures should be released or the steps that should be taken to ensure accuracy.

Instead, they described an ad hoc process that has emerged over the past year, with authority to issue death tolls pushed out to the field and down to the level of division staffs.

...
[The} Oct. 16 statement reflected some of the pitfalls associated with releasing such statistics. The number was immediately challenged by witnesses, who said many of those killed were not insurgents but civilians, including women and children.

...
"Specific numbers are used to periodically provide context and help frame particular engagements," said Brig. Gen. Donald Alston, director of communications for the U.S. military command in Baghdad. He added, however, that there is no plan "to issue such numbers on a regular basis to score progress."

During the Vietnam War, enemy body counts became a regular feature in military statements intended to demonstrate progress. But the statistics ended up proving poor indicators of the war's course. Pressure on U.S. units to produce high death tolls led to inflated tallies, which tore at Pentagon credibility.

"In Vietnam, we were pursuing a strategy of attrition, so body counts became the measure of performance for military units," said Conrad C. Crane, director of the military history institute at the U.S. Army War College. "But the numbers got so wrapped up with career aspirations that they were sometimes falsified."

The Vietnam experience led U.S. commanders to shun issuing enemy death tallies in later conflicts, through the initial stages of the Iraq war. "We don't do body counts on other people," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said in November 2003, when asked on "Fox News Sunday" whether the number of enemy dead exceeded the U.S. toll.

That policy appeared to shift with the assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah in November, an operation considered crucial at the time to denying safe havens to enemy fighters. U.S. military officials reported 1,200 to 1,600 enemy fighters killed, although reporters on the scene noted far fewer corpses were found by Marines after the fighting.

...
High-ranking commanders also have contributed to the trend. In January, Army Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. officer in Iraq, said U.S. and Iraqi forces had killed or captured 15,000 people last year. In May, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mentioned the killing of 250 of insurgent leader Abu Musab Zarqawi's "closest lieutenants" as evidence of progress in Iraq.

...
The release of such figures also can serve to boost the morale of U.S. forces and bolster confidence "that their plans and weapons work effectively," said Marine Lt. Col. David Lapan, spokesman for the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force, which operates in western Iraq.

...
Still, defense specialists such as Crane cautioned that enemy body counts in Iraq and Afghanistan are prone to inaccuracy and are of questionable significance. The murky nature of the conflicts, they said, make it difficult to know at times who is an insurgent, a criminal or an innocent civilian.

"There still are problems in identifying who is who, just as there were in Vietnam," Crane said.

And this swatch of photo-realistic dialogue ripped from Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam masterpiece, “Full Metal Jacket.”

LOCKHART
And, Joker ... where's the weenie?

JOKER
Sir!

LOCKHART
The Kill, JOKER. The kill. I mean, all that fire,
the grunts must've hit something.

JOKER
Didn't see 'em.

LOCKHART
Joker, I've told you, we run two basic stories
here. Grunts who give half their pay to buy gooks
toothbrushes and deodorants — Winning of Hearts and
Minds--okay? And combat action that results in a
kill--Winning the War.

Now you must have seen blood trails ... drag marks?

JOKER
It was raining, sir.

LOCKHART
Well, that's why God passed the law of probability.
Now rewrite it and give it a happy ending--say, uh,
one kill. Make it a sapper or an officer. Which?

JOKER
Whichever you say.

Anybody remember how that scene ends? The “weenie”? The fucking cherry on top?

LOCKHART
Grunts like reading about dead officers.

JOKER
Okay, an officer. How about a general?

Or how about yet another “Number Two Man” in the AQ network that no one had heard of before his teeth had been pulled out of the rubble and matched with a name.

If you still can’t see the terrible symmetry and where it is leading us, lay down where you are, draw a chalk outline around yourself and wait for the M.E.

Because you are already as one with the dead.