So many people, so many stories. Real people. Your next door neighbor. Family. I walked out on the front step this morning to have a smoke and greet the day when, what did I spy, but the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal on my steps. I’d forgot my wife had to subscribe to the paper for a class she’s in. Business something or other. On the bottom half of the front page was a story, Historian Reflects On War and Valor And a Son’s Death.

It’s not the typical piece you’d expect to see in a paper considering the Holiday, let alone this particular paper. Two statements stand out above the rest:

Mr. Bacevich, who served in Vietnam from 1970-1971, and his son shared the same square jaw and confident smile. They also shared an “ironic kinship,” he says. “In the long military history of the U.S., which has featured many victories and glorious moments, my son and I managed to pick the two wars that stand out for all the wrong reasons,” he says.

…and later,

On Tuesday, Mr. Bacevich was sitting on his back porch when the Army casualty assistance officer assigned to help his family handed him a survivor’s benefit check for $100,000. For a widow with children, such checks are a lifesaver. But Mr. Bacevich doesn’t need the money. “I felt sick to my stomach,” he says. “The inadequacy of it just strikes you.”

As a historian and former soldier, he takes clear-cut lessons from the check, his son’s death and the broader war. “When you use force, the unintended consequences that result are so large and the surprises so enormous that it really reaffirms the ancient wisdom to which we once adhered — namely, to see force as something to be used only as a last resort.” In the future, he says, historians will wonder how a country such as the U.S. ever came to see military force as “such a flexible, efficient, cost-effective and supposedly useful instrument.”

It also reminded me of the front page of the National Guard’s newspaper I was reading the drill before last. It made me wonder; who will remember these people? Will you?

THE ON GUARD
Volume 36, Issue 3
March 2007
Newspaper of the National Guard
On-line at www.ngb.army.mil
Tributes for 10 killed in Iraq ‘copter crash
Highest loss in single combat incident of war
By Master Sgt. Bob Haskell
National Guard Bureau

ARLINGTON, Va. – Ten Army National Guard Soldiers, including a grandmother who was a senior noncommissioned officer and two men who were nicknamed “the Senator” and “Big Daddy,” were among the 12 U.S. Soldiers killed when their helicopter was shot down in Iraq Jan. 20. They died during one of the deadliest weekends for U.S. forces engaged in Operation Iraqi Freedom.

It was the highest number of National Guard fatalities in a single combat incident during the five-year Global War on Terrorism. It was also the highest number killed in a single combat incident in more than 50 years, since at least the Korean War in 1950-53, National Guard Bureau officials said.

The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more