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Three US soldiers were killed in Iraq on Friday, bringing the April fatalities to a total of eighteen, double the number in March, as violence there is once again on the rise. In Afghanistan on the same day, three more US soldiers were killed in a Taliban attack in Eastern Afghanistan, part of a stated increase in violence in response to President Obama’s troop surge. Meanwhile, US soldiers involved in a raid last week on the southern Iraqi city of Kut, will not be prosecuted according to Prime Minister Nuri Al Maliki. Despite the election of President Obama, there are still several hundred thousand US troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Each soldier represents an American family living in fear of their son or daughter’s possible death, or the being the perpetrator of murder and violence in the countries they serve. That fear, and an accompanying outrage, is expressed eloquently in a new book by Susan Galleymore, the mother of a soldier who has served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In “Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War and Terror,” Galleymore interviews mothers like herself in Iraq, Israel, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan, and the US. Susan Galleymore made headlines in 2004 when she traveled to Iraq and visited her son stationed at a military base. She is currently in Los Angeles for a number of speaking events over the weekend.

GUEST: Susan Galleymore, founder of MotherSpeak, author of Long Time Passing: Mothers Speak About War and Terror.

For more information, visit www.motherspeak.org, and www.mothersspeakaboutwarandterror.org.