Your Retention Please...

A story with the potential to dampen the cheering over this week's atrocities by the world's socialists and Islamofascists, and America's left:

Army divisions that fought the past 12 months in Iraq have met virtually every re-enlistment goal, a sign that the all-volunteer force remains strong under the stress of frequent deployments and hazardous duty.

The Pentagon has been closely monitoring the re-up rate for five Army divisions that fought in Iraq for about a year. Some officials feared the time away from home and the gritty duty would prompt a large soldier exodus. After all, the war on terrorism is unchartered territory. The 30-year-old volunteer Army has never been this busy in combat.

But numbers compiled this week for the first half of fiscal 2004 show that those five combat units met, or nearly met, all retention targets for enlisted soldiers —the privates, corporals and sergeants who total 416,000 of the Army's 490,000 active force.

"This tends to rebut armchair critics who said the sky is falling and the vultures are circling and the Army is gong to lose all its troops," said Lt. Col. Franklin Childress, an Army spokesman at the Pentagon. "This is not true. The soldiers get it."

The Army also met its recruiting goal of 73,800 inductees last fiscal year, and 34,000 for the first six months of this fiscal year, which began Oct. 1.

"Soldiers are extremely resilient," said Col. Elton Manske, chief of the enlisted division at Army headquarters in the Pentagon. "There is absolutely no sign of a 'hollow Army.' Soldiers are continuing to re-enlist at least at historic rates."

Read the whole thing, and should you feel a slight bit of patriotism or pride in being American, join the club.

Cheers for our young people. A greater generation than many.

Update: Jeers, however, for Kowardly Kos.

I linked his post as support to my claim that the American left was cheering the deaths in Fallujah - I don't make such claims carelessly or capriciously. Kos, however, has drastically changed his tune. The original can be seen in a screen shot captured here.

Here's the text, in it's entirety:

Every Death Should be on the Front Page

"Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them."

Although his subsequent post still has some bearing to the point of the article I linked, his behavior is reprehensible.

In the blogosphere you can't unring a bell.

More to come on this topic, should I overcome my revulsion.

Okay, here.