It would be nice if you cared half as much for the GI as these guys do. But they're just chips to you. Your tax cut, now that's important. What did you get with your tax cut, a new big screen plasma tv?
jttmab
Exhausted GIs search for comrades
Three missing nearly a week; 5 soldiers, 2 journalists killed Friday
U.S. soldiers fought exhaustion Friday as the military pressed forward with a six-day-old search for three missing comrades believed captured by al-Qaida in Iraq in an ambush south of Baghdad.
The continued search efforts came on a day when the military announced the deaths of five U.S. soldiers. ABC News also said two of its Iraqi employees had been killed while driving home from the network's Baghdad bureau.
Even if the three are dead, soldiers said that the families back home needed to know what happened and that the attackers must be punished.
"We'll find them. I'll tell you what, they're going to wish they never did this thing," Lt. Col. Michael Infanti said.
Infanti, commander of the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, gave an impassioned pep talk to soldiers at a patrol base who were exhausted from the search.
"I can't tell you they're alive, and I can't tell you that they're not," he said. "This ain't over. This ain't over by a long shot."
Army Sgt. Anthony J. Schober, 23, who lived in Rohnert Park with his mother and grandparents in the early '90s, was killed in the same firefight.
Thousands of soldiers have been involved in the search, backed by aircraft, intelligence agents and dog teams.
Many troops from the 2nd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, their faces burnt from the sun after scouring fields and villages for clues, said a glimmer of hope kept them going.
"It's knowing that there's a chance that they're still alive -- and even if they're not alive, their families deserve to know what happened to them," Staff Sgt. Dustin Parchey said at a dusty forward base near Mahmoudiya, 10 miles east of where the ambush occurred May 12.
Sgt. Jose Atilano, of Prosser, Wash., estimated he had gotten 14 hours of sleep since the search began, returning only briefly to the base after spending hours in the field. He said he was eager to go back as soon as he got the order.
"We are going to keep going until we find them. If I were in their shoes, I would hope my battle buddies would do the same for me," he said.
Elsewhere Friday, U.S. soldiers captured six men in northeast Baghdad suspected of involvement in smuggling materials for deadly armor-piercing bombs, the military said.
The military said two of the six suspected insurgents arrested Friday, who were not identified, were considered "key leaders" of a "secret-cell terrorist network," one of whom was involved in "numerous murders, kidnappings, assassinations" of Iraqis and coalition troops.
The group was also "known for facilitating the transport of weapons and explosively formed penetrators, or EFPs, from Iran to Iraq, as well as bringing militants from Iraq to Iran for terrorist training," the military said in the statement.
The Bush administration has criticized Iran's government for failing to shut off the flow of EFPs into Iraq, although officials have conceded that they have no conclusive intelligence that senior officials in Tehran are behind the smuggling.
The penetrators use explosives to fire a molten slug that is able to pierce even the strongest armor plating, and they are responsible for dozens of American and Iraqi military deaths every month, according to military officials.
Two of the U.S. soldiers killed Friday, whose names were not released, were taking part in raids in southern Baghdad unconnected to the arrests that uncovered bomb-making materials, according to a military statement, which said nine other soldiers had also been wounded.
Three other soldiers were killed in an explosion near a military vehicle in Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. An Iraqi soldier was killed in front of his house by gunmen in Diwaniya, a Interior Ministry official said.
Alaa Uldeen Aziz, 33, a cameraman for ABC, and soundman Saif Laith Yousuf, 26, were killed Thursday afternoon after they were stopped by two cars full of gunmen and forced out of their vehicle, the network said Friday.
In Baqouba, a Sunni insurgent stronghold north of Baghdad, insurgents were said to have attacked a U.S.-Iraqi base at dawn before being driven off in a firefight that lasted an hour and left seven of the attackers dead, according to an Iraqi security official. But Lt. Col. Michael Donnelly, a spokesman for the U.S. military forces in the city, said he was unaware of any major attack in Baqouba.
Throughout Iraq on Friday, car bombs and suicide attacks caused at least 11 other deaths.
Near Hilla, south of Baghdad, a suicide car bomb detonated near a police checkpoint, killing three policemen and wounding two others, a police official said. Two other policemen were killed and two were wounded by a roadside bomb in Eskandria.
On a highway between the northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk, gunmen attacked three trucks carrying food at dawn and killed the drivers, a police official said. A bomb placed on a bridge near the volatile city of Kirkuk exploded, injuring four people, the police there said.
Insurgents and kidnapping gangs have recently been intensifying their activities on roads in and out of Kirkuk.
In western Baghdad on Friday, a car bomb caused two deaths and a policeman was killed by gunmen, an Interior Ministry official said.
Twenty-five bodies were found around Baghdad.
the city.
On "Good Morning America" on Friday morning, ABC correspondent Terry McCarthy said that Iraqi employees like Aziz and Yousuf, the two ABC journalists killed in the ambush, served "as our eyes and ears in Iraq."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 104 journalists and 39 news-media-support staff members have been killed in Iraq, making it the deadliest conflict for the news media since the organization began tracking deaths 25 years ago.
Eighty-three percent of all news media deaths have been Iraqis.
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