Only one brigade of the 101^st is down range in the current deployment and I have already received a message from a friend about the death of a young soldier in his unit.  My friend gave details of the event and paid tribute to the young soldier.

I’ve heard far too many similar stories over the past decade.

For me, the saga goes back to Dec. 5, 1990, when my friend and fellow Tennessee National Guard soldier died in Daharan.  Joe and I had served together on staff the previous summer during National Guard annual training.

By the summer of 1991, most of us were back in Tennessee mowing lawns as if the previous winter in the desert had never happened.  We had seen way too much death and carnage scattered along the corridor from Hafer al Batin to Basra.

I still have the newspaper clipping on my wall where I told Tim Ghianni that I hoped our sons would not have to fight for peace.  Unfortunately, almost 20 years later, that young generation is now on the front line for peace.  The young 3^rd BCT soldier who died in Afghanistan this week was hardly two years old when I returned from Kuwait.

I will never adjust to hearing these reports.  The first time I read Hal Moore’s We Were Soldiers Once…And Young, a personal account of the 1965 1^st Cav battle in Ia Drang, I cried through every page of chapter 25 as Moore gave a brief bio of each soldier who died in the three days of carnage. Sean Naylor’s account of the Rakkasan’s battle of Anaconda titled Not a Good Day to Die had the same impact.

Moore started that powerful chapter with a quote from Plato – “Only the dead have seen the end to war.”  There will be more emails like the one from Tim this week.  And more tears.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 5th, 2010 at 6:40 am and is filed under Friendship. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.