Where do you count this loss?

From CNN: Marine on liberty dies in gun battle with police.

A 19-year-old Marine from Ceres, California, shot and killed a police officer and wounded another before dying in a weekend gunbattle.

Investigators said he may have been driven by a desire to avoid returning to Iraq.

Andres Raya was scheduled to report back to Camp Pendleton, near San Diego, on Sunday after a weekend leave.

Instead, police said, he went out with a semiautomatic rifle and drew officers into an ambush outside a liquor store in Ceres, a town of about 35,000 next door to his hometown of Modesto.

Raya's mother told the Modesto Bee that her son "came back different" from his last assignment, which included service in western Iraq's insurgent hotbed of Falluja.

"In speaking with family, they conveyed to us that their son did not desire to return to Iraq," said Lt. Bill Heyne, a spokesman for the Stanislaus County Sheriff's Department.

We hear constant, mind numbing tallies of all of the American and Iraqi victims of George Bush's war in Iraq, but where does this death get tallied? This young man was certainly a casualty of the Iraq war just as much as anyone killed by a roadside bomb in Mosul. The police officer, similarly, was a victim of this insanity.

Previous reports of Iraq veterans coming home and winding up in homeless shelters and mental hospitals come to mind. This is why the true cost of this horrible mistake will likely never be known. How many more young men and women will come to a similar end?

SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM THE FUCK HOME NOW.