Good Night, Chris Degiovine

Most if not all readers here will not recognize the name of this 25-year-old former Honors student from Essex High School here in Vermont.

But last Thursday, he became a very nasty - and ever growing - statistic: dead in Iraq, one of the more than 100 U.S. soldiers and more than a thousand Iraqi civilians killed there in April thanks to Bush's war and his surge.

Bush's daughters can't serve, of course; after all, there are no big booze parties in Iraq. But Chris did, and his family will get back a flag-draped coffin none of us are allowed to see.

Bush lied. Chris Degiovine died. And Vermont, which has opposed this war from the start, retains its nasty honor of being the state with the highest per capita loss rate of troops in Bush's war; that is, in the United States. The Iraqi civilians have paid orders of magnitude more dearly and without a vote.