James Bradley’s Flags of Our Fathers reveals that his father’s buddy PFC Ralph Ignatowski, in the course of the battle for Iwo Jima, was captured by the Japanese, who pulled him into one of their caves.

Over the course of three days, the Japanese tortured the unlucky private.

When his body was eventually discovered, fellow marines found that his fingernails had been pulled out, his tongue cut out, his ears cut off, his eyes gouged out, his teeth smashed in, his arms broken, and his genitalia cut off and stuffed into his mouth, before he had been bayoneted to death.

Do you think the War Department in 1945 told his mother and father in Milwaukee exactly what happened to their son Ralph?

In the past, the practice of telling families that their soldier had died instantly, in the course of performing a vital military mission, was universal. No one was going to tell some mom and dad back home that their son’s death was a meaningless accident, or a grieving widow that her husband died screaming.

Death occurs commonly in war, and not all soldiers’ deaths are beautiful, painless, or even intentional. Accidental casualties from friendly fire have always occurred. The outcome of the American Civil War might possibly have been different, if General Thomas Jonathan Jackson had not been mortally wounded by fire from a North Carolina Regiment in the closing hours of the Confederate victory at Chancellorsville, May 2, 1863.

Did Stonewall Jackson’s widow demand an investigation or insist that those unfortunate North Carolinians should be punished? Did General Lee conduct a formal inquiry to determine who exactly was to blame? They did not. People used to be mature enough to recognize that unfortunate accidents occur in war.

The conniving opportunists of the MSM are clearly intelligent enough to know all this perfectly well, but the accidental death of Corporal Pat Tillman was deliberately publicized and manufactured into a large-scale scandal by the press specifically in order to damage the American military and undermine its efforts in the war in the Middle East. The Tillman family has behaved disgracefully as well, demonstrating a complete absence of both the character and patriotism which distinguished their son.

Now the US Military is responding to all this unseemly melodrama by delivering up the required victims for public sacrifice.

Thanks to our utterly corrupt media, and one selfish and not-very-sensible family, henceforth we can count on reliable reportage of exactly what happened to US casualties reaching their loved ones on the homefront.

“Yes, Mrs. Smith, your son Joey was burned to death by napalm. No, his death was excruciatingly painful and took a very, very long time. I’m sorry, as it happened, his unit was assigned to undertake a futile attack on a target which ultimately proved to be of no military value, and our own air units mistakenly bombed them. We’re very sorry.”