But just for tonight I want to pause with this reminder:
Each is a life, a human in a network of relationship - sons and daughters, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, lovers and friends.
Not numbers.
The same is true of every Afghan or Iraqi life lost.
It's not a game. War is hell. They are not statistics. Not a single person who perishes is a statistic.
I post the military death toll for Iraq as the number changes. When I get a chance I cut and paste a bit more. I do not want that ever to be for me an automatic excercise.
Time after time faithful persons take the time to honor the fallen in the recurring diary at Daily Kos titled "IGTNT" (I got the news today). That is where I found these photos tonight. With each photo there is some background, some hint of the impact of their loss. Where they are from, which unit they served in, how they died, whom they leave behind.
From tonight's diary:
After a hundred years
Nobody knows the place, --
Agony, that enacted there,
Motionless as peace.
Weeds triumphant ranged,
Strangers strolled and spelled
At the lone orthography
Of the elder dead.
Winds of summer fields
Recollect the way, --
Instinct picking up the key
Dropped by memory.
- Emily Dickinson
...
Please remember these heroes and their loved ones in your thoughts and prayers tonight, and always. May the winds of summer fields help us recollect the way --
Here is the series of IGTNT diaries.
May they all rest in peace and rise in glory.
--the BB
