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WASHINGTON (AP) — Military officials say a sailor from North Texas has been killed in a bombing in Afghanistan.

The Defense Department on Wednesday identified the Navy casualty as Petty Officer 3rd Class Clayton R. Beauchamp of Weatherford, Texas.

DOD says Beauchamp was on patrol in the Shaban District of the Helmand Province when his unit came under attack. Beauchamp was killed Tuesday. Further details on the incident were not immediately released.

He was assigned to 1st Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 6, 1st Marine Division (Forward), I Marine Expeditionary Force (Forward) at Camp Pendleton, Calif.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.

The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.

Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.

By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.

Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.

Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.

"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.

"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the 'support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."

Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.

"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."

Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.

More than 1,950 Americans have died in Afghanistan and thousands more have been wounded since President George W. Bush launched attacks on Oct. 7, 2001 to rout al-Qaida after it used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.

Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."

Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.

But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.

Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009, years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.

And over time, his administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.

While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.

"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.

It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.

World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success if measured in increments.

The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.

In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.

Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.

"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.

Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.

Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?

"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."

Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.

After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.

"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"

Associated Press Writers Kristin Hall in Nashville, Tennessee and Jennifer Agiesta in Washington contributed to this report.

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — Insurgents attacked a large party in a Taliban-controlled area of southern Afghanistan and beheaded 17 people, officials said on Monday.

A local government official initially said the victims were civilians at a celebration late Sunday involving music and dancing in the Musa Qala district of Helmand province. The official, Neyamatullah Khan, said the Taliban killed the party-goers for flouting the extreme brand of Islam embraced by the militants.

However, provincial government spokesman Daoud Ahmadi said later that those killed were caught up in a fight between two Taliban commanders over two women, who were among the dead. Ahmadi said shooting broke out during the fight but it was unclear whether the music and dancing triggered the violence, and whether the dead were all civilians or possibly included some fighters.

All of the bodies were decapitated, but it was not clear if they had been shot first, he said.

In other violence, two American soldiers were shot and killed by one of their Afghan colleagues in the east — bringing the number of Americans killed this month by Afghan allies to 12. Afghan officials said the killings appeared to be accidental. NATO would not comment on whether the killings were intentional or accidental, but a U.S. Defense Department official said there were indications that it was an intentional killing.

The Taliban has controlled large parts of Musa Qala, a district encompassing more than 100 villages, since 2001. They enforce the same strict interpretation of Islamic law that was imposed on all of Afghanistan during Taliban rule from 1996-2001.

U.S. Marines have battled the Taliban for years in Musa Qala, but the insurgent group still wields significant power in the area as international forces across the country draw down and hand over control to Afghan forces. Helmand province, where Musa Qala is located, is one of the areas that has seen the largest reduction in U.S. troops. The U.S. started reducing forces from a peak of nearly 103,000 last year, and plans to have 68,000 troops by October.

Many Afghans and international observers have expressed concerns that the Taliban will try to re-impose strict Islamic justice as international forces withdraw. Under the Taliban, all music and film was banned as un-Islamic, and women were barred from leaving their homes without a male relative as an escort.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai condemned the killings and said they were against Shariah law.

"The killing of innocent civilians by Taliban is an unforgivable crime." Karzai said in a statement.

Taliban spokesman Qari Yousef Ahmadi, however, rejected allegations that the Taliban were involved in the incident.

"No Talib have killed any civilians. Neither were Taliban commanders fighting each other. We don't know about this thing. Whether it happened or not, we were not involved," Ahmadi said.

The killings contradict the Taliban leadership's orders for their fighters to avoid killing ordinary Afghans, suggesting a breakdown in discipline and a further fracturing of the insurgency.

Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar urged his commanders earlier this month to "employ tactics that do not cause harm to the life and property of the common countrymen." The insurgents' supreme leader has issued such edicts from hiding before, perhaps trying to soften the extremist movement's image, but the order appears to have been widely ignored.

A U.N. report last month said 1,145 civilians were killed and 1,954 others were injured in the first half of the year, 80 percent of them by militants.

In fact, while the Taliban seeks to soften its image, the beheadings recall the days of public executions during their rule.

There are fears that the Taliban will again control southern Afghanistan and impose their strict interpretation of Islamic law on the region as foreign troops gradually withdraw in the next two years. Nearly all foreign troops are to leave Afghanistan by the end of 2014 and the U.S.-led NATO coalition hopes that Afghan security forces will be strong enough to take control.

As the drawdown progresses, there has been a surge in attacks by Afghan forces against their allies.

A group of U.S. and Afghan soldiers came under an insurgent attack in Laghman province Monday, said Noman Hatefi, a spokesman for the Afghan army corps in eastern Afghanistan. He said the troops returned fire and took up fighting positions.

He said the two Americans were killed when an Afghan soldier fell and accidentally discharged his weapon.

"He didn't do this intentionally. But then the commander of the (Afghan) unit started shouting at him, 'What did you do? You killed two NATO soldiers!' And so he threw down his weapon and started to run," Hatefi said.

The U.S. troops had already called in air support to help with the insurgent attack and the aircraft fired on the escaping soldier from above, killing him, Hatefi said.

NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Hagen Messer of Germany confirmed that two international soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier in Laghman province, but would not comment on whether the killing was intentional or accidental.

In Washington, a U.S. Defense Department official said the Afghan soldier fired a rocket-propelled grenade at the Americans and that this seemed to indicate that it was an intentional act. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because an investigation is under way, said he was unaware of any indications that the shooting was accidental.

Insider attacks have been a problem for the U.S.-led military coalition for years, but it has recently become a crisis. There have been at least 33 such attacks so far this year, killing 42 coalition members, mostly Americans. Last year, there were 21 attacks, killing 35; and in 2010, there were 11 attacks with 20 deaths.

The chief spokesman for NATO forces in the country said coalition forces were not pulling back from collaborating with the Afghans because of the attacks.

"We are not going to reduce the close relationship with our Afghan partners," Brig. Gen. Gunter Katz told reporters in the capital.

Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid said that he could not confirm any link between the attacker in Monday's shooting and the insurgency. In previous insider attacks, the Taliban have quickly claimed responsibility and identified the assailants.

Helmand officials also reported that 10 Afghan soldiers were killed in an attack on a checkpoint in the south, and five were either kidnapped or joined their assailants. Daoud Ahmadi, the provincial spokesman, said insurgents attacked the checkpoint in Washir district Sunday evening. Four soldiers were wounded he said. The Afghan Defense Ministry said the checkpoint was attacked by more than 100 insurgents.

Daoud Ahmadi said the five missing soldiers left with the insurgents but it was unclear if they were kidnapped or went voluntarily.

In Ghor province in the east, officials said three students were killed in what looked like a revenge killing by the family of a Taliban commander who died recently in an explosion. Provincial Police Chief Gen. Dilawer Shah Dilawer said it appears the commander's family believed the students or their family members were somehow involved in setting the explosive. He stressed, however, that the investigation was continuing.

Khan reported from Kandahar, Afghanistan. Associated Press writers Amir Shah and Rahim Faiez in Kabul and Robert Burns in Washington contributed to this report.

WASHINGTON (AP) — The roadside bomb that exploded outside Andrew Robinson's Humvee in Iraq six years ago broke the Marine staff sergeant's neck and left him without use of his legs. It also cast doubt on his ability to father a child, a gnawing emotional wound for a then-23-year-old who had planned to start a family with his wife of less than two years.

The catastrophic spinal cord injury meant the couple's best hope for children was in vitro fertilization, an expensive and time-consuming medical procedure whose cost isn't covered by the Department of Veterans Affairs. Robinson and his wife were forced to pay out of pocket, with help from a doctor's discount and drugs donated by other patients.

A bill being considered in the Senate would expand the VA's medical benefits package so other veterans, and their spouses or surrogates, don't have to bear the same expense. The department currently covers a range of medical treatment for veterans, including some infertility care, but the legislation specifically authorizes the VA to cover IVF and to pay for procedures now provided for some critically injured active-duty soldiers.

The bill's meant to help wounded veterans start families as they return home from war and to address a harrowing consequence of combat that can radically change a couple's marriage but receives less attention than post-traumatic stress disorder and brain injuries.

"It's common sense: a male veteran cannot have a kid by himself. It doesn't happen. They need obviously to have it with their wife or a partner," said Robinson, of Florence, N.J., who is now 29 and was injured in a 2006 explosion in Al Anbar province. "So for the VA to say, 'Oh, we can only cover this part of it,' it just kind of doesn't make sense."

In vitro fertilization, the process of mixing sperm and eggs in a laboratory dish and transferring the resulting embryo into a woman's uterus, costs thousands of dollars and each cycle can take weeks. It's physically taxing too, requiring hormone injections and other invasive steps, and can take multiple tries to produce a viable pregnancy. For many wounded veterans, it represents the most promising option.

More than 1,830 veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have suffered pelvic fractures and genitourinary injuries since 2003 that could affect their abilities to reproduce, according to Pentagon figures provided to Sen. Patty Murray, the bill's sponsor and chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

"Because they served our country, they now can't have a family, which is part of their dream," said the Washington state Democrat, who hopes the committee will act on the bill after returning from August recess. "I think we now have a responsibility to not take that dream away."

Combat injuries can dampen a soldier's ability to have children in any number of ways, said Mark Edney, a Maryland urologist and Army reservist who treats veterans. For men, a blast to the genitalia can harm sperm-producing testicles, while a spinal cord injury can cause erectile dysfunction or ejaculatory problems. For women, shrapnel can injure the pelvis and fallopian tubes, preventing fertilization.

Although expertise exists to help them become parents, Edney said veterans with fertility problems form a "relatively small subset of patients that are just forgotten in terms of policy."

The legislation would likely have helped spouses like Brenda Isaacson, who said the VA's insurance plan covered the cost of recovering sperm from her husband, Chuck — an Army staff sergeant paralyzed by a 2007 helicopter crash in Afghanistan — but not the more than half-dozen IVF attempts the couple underwent before finally having a daughter nearly a year and a half ago. She bristled at being told by officials that infertility services were not medically or psychologically necessary.

"You tell that to a man who's just been wounded — that it's not psychologically necessary to have children — when that's all we'd talked about, having babies," she said.

The proposal comes as technological improvements have made IVF a more common — and reliably successful — way to have children, with the number of births as a result of it and similar procedures rising in the past decade. It's more openly discussed in popular culture, too, from television talk shows to celebrity magazines. And the VA is becoming more sensitive to family health concerns as it encounters younger veterans trying to start post-war lives, said Patty Hayes, the agency's chief consultant for women's veterans' health.

"The culture has changed. There's a lot more veterans who need this," she said, adding that the VA was looking closely at expanding infertility treatment options.

The VA says it already covers some fertility services, including counseling, diagnostic tests and intrauterine insemination — a method of artificial insemination — for the veteran. But that leaves out many veterans and their spouses whose best hope for pregnancy is the more physically rigorous, but also more reliable, IVF process, where the average cycle costs $12,400, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine.

The process can be especially vexing for military couples coping with life after a catastrophic injury and trying to establish a new normal, said Barbara Cohoon, deputy director of government relations for the National Military Family Association, a nonprofit advocacy group.

"When someone has an injury and they're paralyzed from the waist down, being able to reconnect emotionally and physically as a couple is part of the therapy," she said.

The Defense Department recently made IVF a covered benefit for active-duty service members who are either seriously ill or catastrophically injured, with a policy that allows for coverage of three completed IVF cycles for the soldier's spouse, said spokeswoman Cynthia Smith. She said artificial insemination using donated sperm or eggs is excluded under its policy.

Robinson, the now-29-year-old Marine who suffered the broken neck, said he started exploring ways to have children — something he and his wife had always discussed — during an extensive rehabilitation process.

They tried artificial insemination, which didn't work because of poor sperm quality resulting from his injury. They spent $6,000 of their own money on IVF and got pregnant on the first try — and now have 8-month-old twins Collin and Leah.

"Everyone deserves to have a chance at a family. We were able to save the money and stuff like that. But maybe for someone who isn't able to do that, I would hate to see that they don't have that option," he said.

Tracy Keil used IVF to conceive her twins after her husband, Matt, was shot in the neck in Iraq in 2007 and rendered a quadriplegic, six weeks after they wed. The couple was able to save the thousands of dollars needed for treatment because they live mortgage-free in a custom-made home designed by a nonprofit that builds houses for disabled veterans and their families. She's since become a leading advocate for the legislation, testifying on it this summer before a Senate committee.

"I agree with the fact that they had other hurdles to get over first, especially with PTSD and suicide and traumatic brain injury. They had other things that were just plain more important," Keil said of the VA. "But now we're at the point where those programs are in place and it's time to address this issue."

Follow Eric Tucker on Twitter at http://twitter.com/etuckerAP

Editor's Note: This story is the latest installment in a joint initiative by The Associated Press and Associated Press Media Editors taking a closer look at this latest generation of war veterans as they return to civilian life, and the effect this is having on them, their families and American society.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Faced with tighter budgets after the Iraq War but still in charge of treating tens of thousands of injured troops, the military is getting a hand from a private foundation that is building medical centers specializing in the signature physical and psychological injuries of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Pentagon has a partnership with the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund, which is raising $100 million to build clinics on military bases. The clinics will form a network aimed at treating and researching traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder, two areas the military has focused on since roadside bombs became a common weapon in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army officials say the foundation, which grew out of the philanthropic efforts of the late New York real estate businessman Zachary Fisher, has been highly effective because it can sidestep government bureaucracy on construction projects and provide a financial boost for medical advances that are desperately needed for injured soldiers, Marines, airmen and sailors.

Since 9/11, the charity has built the nation's top specialized hospitals for troops injured in Iraq and Afghanistan: a brain injury center of excellence in Bethesda, Md., and an amputee and burn rehabilitation center in San Antonio, Texas.

"We have felt that buildings often are catalysts for better care and attention," said Marty Edelman, a trustee of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and a New York-based real estate attorney.

Staff Sgt. Spencer Milo, 27, went to the National Intrepid Center for Excellence in Bethesda to treat persistent symptoms from a concussion he suffered during a suicide bomber blast in southern Afghanistan last year.

"The second you walk into these buildings, you instantly feel calm," he said. "You're in a small group and you really get very, very specific treatment. The first time you get there you sit in a room with every single doctor and you tell them what's going on, so you don't need to repeat yourself. Everyone is consistently on the same page."

At the Intrepid Center, there were no rushed appointments or bouncing from one doctor to the next, Milo said. He also benefited from alternative treatments and therapies that aren't available at other military hospitals, like art therapy, and he was given a service dog to help him in his recovery.

Now the fund is widening its scope beyond the two hospitals with a plan to build between seven and 10 clinics at the nation's largest military installations, with a hub-and-spoke model to channel the latest patient data up to research hubs and push down treatment models to the doctors and therapists.

Clinic groundbreakings have already happened at Fort Belvoir in Virginia and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina and additional clinics will be built at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Fort Hood and Fort Bliss in Texas, Fort Carson in Colorado, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Joint Base Lewis McChord in Washington.

The charity raises the money to build the facilities and once completed, turns over control to the military branches, which are then responsible for staffing and operating the clinics.

"We don't pretend to be doctors," Edelman said. "So we build the best facilities that money can buy and we engage the entire American community to support us."

The foundation has a history of stepping into the gap when the government has been slow to react or respond to the military's neediest families. At the beginning of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the fund provided grants to the families of U.S. service members who were killed until federal legislation substantially increased survivor benefits.

Edelman said the charity doesn't focus on complaints that the military hasn't done enough to adequately treat the signature wounds from Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I can understand people saying, 'How come the government hasn't already done it?'" he said. "... Sometimes it's hard for it to move quickly, but we can. We don't think about as they haven't, we just think about it as we can.

"We are going to help them do it in the time frame and the level of excellence that the American private sector can do," he said.

Col. Nikki Butler, director of the rehabilitation and reintegration division for the office of the Army surgeon general, said the Army is not dependent on the Intrepid Fund but does appreciate the help.

The Army has already been treating soldiers with traumatic brain injury and PTSD at these installations, she said, but the centers will enhance that care with a multidiscipline approach that includes some new types of providers, like acupuncturists to treat chronic pain.

She said the facilities will be very helpful for some of the Army posts that have outgrown existing space, and each new clinic will have staff members tailored to best suit the population at the local installation.

"You want to be able to treat them holistically, in that patient care setting, rather than sending them all over the place," Butler said. "It may require different types of providers, but I think what you get is efficiency and eventually get less demand on the system and better use of the patient's time and the provider's time."

Butler said partnerships with the NFL and public giving campaigns like this one are helping to shed light on concussion care and behavioral health issues.

"Brain injuries are not easy to see and people don't like to talk about the psychological pieces of it. When you have strong partnerships with other big entities, then I think it's much easier to bring it to light in the public venue," she said. "The public is much more aware than they ever were even five, 10 years ago."

Even as the military shrinks in size and overseas obligations, there will continue to be a long-term need to treat these soldiers, Butler said, noting more than 80 percent of all TBI injuries don't occur in a war zone.

The charitable giving comes at a key time for the defense department, which is facing the possibility of severe funding cuts if Congress can't agree on a budget.

Dr. Bret Logan, director of the TBI center at Fort Campbell, Ky., where one of the new clinics will be built later this year, acknowledged that it's a tight financial year for the government, but the military is prioritizing care for the neediest troops.

"What's important is that you don't become a black hole where people are just dumping money into," he said.

Logan said there's always been a constant stream of individuals and groups who want to help these soldiers, but the Intrepid Fund has found a way to streamline public giving.

"It falls to guys like Fisher and the Intrepid Heroes Fund to get the organization together to find these people," he said. "I think everyone is looking for a way, even now, to help. It's a personal thing for people. The easier you make it for people to help, the more they are likely to do so."

Milo, the Army staff sergeant who was treated in Bethesda, said it's refreshing to see a charity step up to help soldiers who are still fighting and dying overseas.

"A lot of times you come back and people want to turn a cold shoulder to you and pretend like it doesn't happen," he said. "It's nice there are people out there like the foundation and others that do care and want to help us when we come back."

Follow Kristin Hall at http://twitter.com/kmhall/