Each number is more than a mangled corpse in a body bag. Each number brings with it a story, a fresco of relationships, of lives interwoven and shatterred, fatherless children and grieving widows and bewildered children. I think of a rock tossed into a pond, and all the ripples that flow outward, representing all the lives that that single soldier touched and all the people who will be affected by his or her death. Yes, I know it sounds sentimental, but it’s also true. Reading this a few minutes ago drove it home.

Dixie Codner had a question for the marines who came down her gravel road, past the rows of corn and alfalfa, to tell her that her 19-year-old son, Kyle, had been killed in Iraq. Should she bring them the dress blues, still pressed and hanging in his closet, for his funeral? No need, she recalled them answering. They had dress uniforms from all the services, all sizes, waiting back at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where the bodies of American service members come home.

“What does that say?” Codner asked as she sat at her kitchen table on a recent morning. “How many more are they expecting? All I know is that there are 1,000 families that feel just like we do. We go to bed at night and we don’t have our children.”

Each of the 1,000 soldiers and marines, sailors and airmen killed in nearly 18 months since President George W. Bush sent troops to invade Iraq leaves behind a grieving family, a story, a unique memory of duty and sacrifice in what has become the deadliest U.S. war since Vietnam..

It’s so painful, so infuriating, so fundamentally wrong that it hurts. And they want to focus on whether Kerry was in Cambodia or not some 30+ years ago. We can’t let this continue, not for another day let along four more long, horrible years.

Update: Please go here to read Rush Limbaugh’s utterly repellent response to the death toll topping 1,000. Unfuckingbelievable.