Remembering Fallen Soldiers

Running this morning along my suburb's main thoroughfare, I started to recount each of the 12 men and women I briefly described in a memorial program I helped create a few weeks ago. Some had big writeups in their hometown newspapers, especially if that newspaper was The New York Times. Others had very little, so I had to go searching and found this site - the name escapes me at the moment - that lists each fallen soldier and allows family and friends to post a message or a memory, sort of like writing on someone's wall in Facebook. There was so much expressed grief and guilt in those comments it was sometimes hard for me to continue.

In one case, a bomb went off just as an outpost shift was changing, and had the bomb denotated 10 minutes later, another crew would have been killed. Instead, they had to handle the carnage. In another, a compatriate wanted everyone to know that their son or brother or boyfriend had pushed him out of the way to take a bullet to the chest. Most grew up in or near poverty and saw the military as a way to improve their lot in life. They married young and left behind babies. They remained close to their mothers and were role models for their younger siblings.

The most heartbreaking was a young man from New York who watched his fiance get blown up in a convoy blast. He came home and promised his mother he would not go back to Baghdad. He told her he was going to take his savings and enroll in school in Texas. And when he called her from his second tour of duty, he stuck to that story. You can imagine the disbelief when they came to her door to tell her that her son was dead. And you can imagine the searing heartache when four days after his funeral, she received a prearranged bouquet of flowers from him on Mother's Day.

I didn't expect to end today's run with a huge lump in my throat, but I'm kinda glad it's still there. We all have our own way of remembering those who died serving our country. I guess this was mine.