Word of a new video claiming that three captured soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division were killed in Iraq last month reached the gates of the Fort Drum Army base as some of their comrades prepared to return to war.
Soldiers getting their haircut could watch the news on TV screens on Monday, but most who came and went from Bradley's Military, a supply store just outside the sprawling base that the division calls home, paid little attention. Few wanted to talk about it.
"The [American] people don't need to hear any more about the battlefield," said Specialist Daniel Asuncion, 21, who was injured in a rocket-propelled grenade attack less than a month ago in Afghanistan. "They already hear enough. It's propaganda for our enemy."
But Sergeant Troy Jenkins, who returns to Iraq on Saturday, said the fate of the three soldiers weighed on him, as did the thought of how those under his command would react.
"It means a lot, especially thinking about those soldiers and if they're dead or if they're not, what type of torment they went through," Jenkins said. "They're doing a job liberating the Iraqi people. It gets to me because you see how it works with the insurgents that we capture. We take care of them."
Jenkins, 36, has spent the past 13 years with the 10th Mountain Division and was previously in the Marines. He has served in Afghanistan, Iraq twice, and Saudi Arabia.
"I worry about my young fellows and how they process it," Jenkins said. "I keep their head in the game, keep them occupied."
The video said al-Qaeda-linked insurgents had killed the three soldiers in the middle of last month and claimed to show footage of the ambush. The video offered no proof that the soldiers had been killed and buried.
The body of one of the soldiers was found in the Euphrates River, but the other two remain missing.
Meanwhile, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that Americans were becoming more discontented over the situation in Iraq and more unhappy with Democrats who won control of Congress last November largely because voters wanted to see an end to the war.
Just 39 percent said they approved of the job Congress was doing, down from 44 percent in April. Approval of congressional Democrats dropped to 44 percent from 54 percent, the poll showed.
Much of that drop was fueled by lower approval ratings of congressional Democrats among strong opponents of the Iraq war, independents and liberal Democrats, the Washington Post reported yesterday.
In April, Americans, by a 25-point margin, trusted the Democrats over US President George W. Bush to handle the situation in Iraq. In the new poll, Democrats held their advantage but only by 16 points, the Post reported
Bush's job-approval rating stood at 35 percent, unchanged from April.
Deep public skepticism about Iraq, concerns about the Democrats and Bush and near-record-high gasoline prices appeared to have combined to sour the overall mood in the country, the Post said.
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