No offense to Ms. Daskal and this very moving account of what appears to be yet another horrific tale out of Baghdad. I just wish someone or even a few of us would ask ourselves how this is essentially any different than "conventional" warfare? I still do not get how we continue to rationalize war as a concept, as a precept, as a way to deal with conflict. We have long passed the stage where total distruction is a remote possibility but instead looms directly overhead. We have the capacity to blow ourselves up. Dabbling in these contained massacres seems like an exercise in posing. Why are we posing?

People gasp at the fact that contractors, eg. paid guns-for-hire in Iraq (Blackwater, et al) are making so much more $$ than the "unpaid guns" (eg. US Army), but in reality a majority of our soldiers enlist because they have no financial resources to do much else. They hope to use the money provided for college, to get training they otherwise couldn't get and to feed their families.

While this incident is monumentally tragic, it is the signature of war. Killing. That seems to be the mission. Whoever kills the most, wins. There was a time in this country when we protested -- not just against the Vietnam War -- but against war. "War is not healthy for children and other living things" said our tee shirts. Can we stop parsing out incident after incident and realize collectively that other avenues for peace exist and should be explored.

I hate to be alarmist or extremists or any other of the many "ists" but I'd say dumpist this man-ist. Your indulgence of his "moods" and attributing them (generously) to being chemically induced (de-caf? You are kidding, right?) is troubling. I've heard so many married women with kids say they have [x number] of kids + their husband = total number of kids. You seem to be in their camp.

If this SOB has you by the financial balls, then get a lawyer and get your fair share but come on. This isn't a question of HOW do you tell your kids their father is an A-hole but rather how to tell them why he is only visiting (with supervision) on the weekends.

your friend

raised-by-two-bickering-dysfunctional geniuses

What's often missing from these pieces on weight/health/women is any real sense of what it means to be healthy & happy as a human in our insane looks-are-collateral culture. There are real physical tsunamis out there -- Diabetes 1 and (for me) bulimia -- but so much of the actual cure lies outside of the physical issue itself.

When I was 16, my family uprooted from a safe suburbia to the heart of NYC during the 1977 Black Out/son of Sam mania. Out of fear, I refused to go out of the apartment and made excuses to stay home. Staying home, the only comfort food around was spaghetti, lots of butter. I gained about 50 pounds in under three months. In a panic, I discovered, after eating, I could throw up. The fear was never really addressed -- my family was too busy with other crisis; so the cycle began to spin out of control.

Compound this with "puberty" and trying to deal with the next phase of my life -- etc. etc. and, fast forward, at 29 I ended up in the emergency room with a sub arachnoid brain hemorrhage.

The years of throwing up had put so much pressure on my cranium, a blood vessel finally exploded, nearly killing me. The doctors said I was only one of the 5% who survive without life paralysis, if they survive at all.

What no one ever told me -- as a bulimic -- was the ways in which the behavior was both a self-protective act as well as self destructive. It was trying to fix the problem of stuffing in comfort foods (still letting myself zone out to deal with unresolved fears) and not allow my body to balloon up to another 50 pounds. In other words, I was trying to "NOT have my cake and eat it too."

I had to (on my own) determine how to put my own health above and beyond anything else. I forced myself to go to dance classes where I had to deal with being "in" my own body and eventually found a balance where the amount of energy I put out equaled what I was taking in. After years of practice, I overcame both the bulimia and the fears that initiated the behavior in the first place.

The causes are so much more the point than the behavior -- in my case -- nobody really helped me to understand what I needed in order to feel good in my body. All of the issues had to be dealt with on my own. One by one. Nobody who has talked or written about eating disorders ever spoke to my need to understand my problem.

This article does much more for understanding the causes of needing to be thin than I've seen in ages. Good work.