Word: blissed
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...POWs was an African-American female, 30 years old, named Shana--Shoshana's nickname. Not quite ready to believe the worst, he called Telemundo, which confirmed that his daughter had been spotted on Iraqi TV. It would be six long hours, however, before officials at Fort Bliss called Johnson and his wife Eunice to confirm what the couple had already surmised from surfing TV channels and the Internet. Their gentle daughter--a single mom who, when she was a child, "wouldn't fuss, wouldn't fight"--had become a prisoner...
...Fort Bliss, the 507th's home base, shock came first, then silence. No one on the post could tell the families of the dead and missing what had gone wrong, what a cook and a computer specialist, a mechanic and an aspiring elementary school teacher were doing in a convoy so close to battle, so unprotected. The 507th's usual job is to keep diesel tankers rolling, fix generators and service Patriot missile batteries. But it was attacked on March 23, at night, somewhere on or near Highway 1, one of the main north-south roads in Iraq...
Reconstructing the attack has not been easy. Even the survivors are confused. Initial reports from the battlefield said the 507th had taken a wrong turn while passing near the town of Nasiriyah, but U.S. Congressman Silvestre Reyes, whose El Paso district encompasses Fort Bliss, says he was told by a senior officer that the convoy was ambushed on a bridge and had not taken a wrong turn. The lightly armed unit didn't have a chance. It had no combat escort, he says. If that's true, the fault for the convoy's vulnerability would lie not with its leader...
...families, the lack of official information adds to the heartbreak. "Everybody that I spoke to at Fort Bliss said they had no knowledge," says Johnson. "I said, 'I got information off TV and off the Internet. What's up? You people don't know anything?' They said, 'No, we don't know...
...vaulted living room, Shana's dad is glued these days to the all-news TV networks. As a break, he walks the neat subdivision, tying yellow ribbons around trees. The streets are named after baseball heroes: Roger Maris, Casey Stengel, Yogi Berra. Just to the north lies the Fort Bliss military reservation, spread across white sands. With winds kicking up the Chihuahuan Desert last week, the sky over El Paso was filled with irritating sand--much like that coating the troops in Iraq. Johnson, trapped in his own hell, doesn't notice. "The wait is extremely painful now," he says...