Skip this zit. If your boy gets elected for the first time, or appointed for a second term, you'll get your wish of another front or two. Can't wait, huh?? Your son 17 yet???
By Sharon Cohen and Pauline Arrillaga
The Associated Press
Updated: 4:41 p.m. ET Sept. 7, 2004Their faces, smiling or solemn, have become all too familiar in our newspapers and on television. Their names sound a somber roll call — Smith, Falaniko, Ramos, Lee — a roster that seems to grow daily.
There have been more than 1,000 now, U.S. military personnel who have died in the Iraq war.
They are sons and daughters from city streets and rural hamlets. They are teens who went from senior proms to boot camp and battle and middle-aged family men who put aside retirement and grandchildren for the dangers of a war zone.
What they share is that they will not see home again.
What does the number mean? On D-Day alone, more Americans lost their lives. At the peak of Vietnam, hundreds of U.S. troops were dying every week. And in just one September morning three years ago, 2,792 people perished when two towers crumbled to the streets of New York.
Still, 1,000 is a grim milestone.
The conflict in Iraq has claimed almost three times the number of Americans lost in the entire Persian Gulf War. And this time, the vast majority of U.S. deaths — all but 138 — came after major combat operations were declared over. “Mission Accomplished,” read a banner on the aircraft carrier where President Bush spoke on May 1, 2003.
Sixteen months later, the fighting goes on. So do the funerals.
The lengthening casualty roster reflects a front line that shifted from sandy deserts to shadowy streets, a stubborn insurgency, a conflict far bloodier than many expected.
Back home, there is another growing count: towns that lost future firefighters and policemen, churches left without Sunday school teachers, families where infants will never meet their dads.
“It’s almost like losing a community,” says Luis Pizzini, an educator in San Diego, Texas. Two of his former students died in Iraq.
Ruben Valdez and Jose Amancio Perez grew up on the same block. Valdez, 21, was a Marine. Perez, 22, chose the Army. In their little community of fewer than 5,000, not once but twice, townsfolk lined the road to pay tribute as a hearse carried a native son home.
Now, the two men lie buried only a few feet apart.
Courtesy of the Hampton family via AP
When Kimberly Hampton headed off to war the first time, she sent her mother an e-mail, joking about the hazards of flying a small helicopter. But she had a serious message, too.
"If there is anything I can say to ease your mind ... if anything ever happens to me, you can be certain that I am doing the things I love," she wrote. "... I’m living my dreams for sure, living life on the edge at times and pushing the envelope. ...
"So, worry if you must," she added, "but you can be sure that your only child is living a full, exciting life and is HAPPY!"
Kimberly Hampton wrote that message on Feb. 4, 2003, while stationed in Afghanistan. Eleven months later, the 27-year-old Army captain was killed in Fallujah, Iraq, when her Kiowa helicopter was shot down.
"A lot of times when I’m feeling down, I’ll read it," her mother, Ann, says of the note. "It doesn’t take away the hurt or the loneliness. It does reinforce the fact that she was happy."
Growing up in Easley, S.C., Kimberly Hampton excelled at most everything: She was the high school student body president and captain of the tennis team, then ROTC battalion commander and an honors graduate from Presbyterian College.
Her dreams of taking to the skies began early. When she finished Army flight school, her parents presented her with a composition she had written in third grade saying she "would like to fly like a bird."
Hampton liked the structure and discipline of the military and in college wrote a letter to her mother, saying: "The United States needs good, solid troops in the hot spots. That’s where I want to be."
Stationed with the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq, she had taken over a troop command months before her death.
"She was an overachiever," her mother says. "She felt she had to work harder, maybe because she was female. But that didn’t bother her."
Ann Hampton says she was comforted by a chaplain in Iraq who said he admired her daughter because "she never lost her femininity."
"Being in command, she had to be rough and tough ... but she was extremely fair," her mother says. "Just because she lived in a man’s world, she didn’t try to be a man. At night, she could take her hair out of the bun, and still look like a beautiful girl."
"She was a sweet girl, tenderhearted," her mother adds. "She was just real genuine."
Eagle Butte News via AP
To his friends in the Army, he was known as Sheldon Hawk Eagle.
To his family and fellow tribe members, the 21-year Army private killed in Iraq was also remembered with a proud Lakota name: Wanbli Ohitika — Brave Eagle.
A member of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, he was one of 17 soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division killed last November in a collision of two helicopters in Mosul, Iraq.
Hawk Eagle could trace his bloodline to two great Indian chiefs: Crazy Horse on his father’s side, and Sitting Bull on his mother’s, according to his aunt, Barbara Strikes Enemy Turner.
Her nephew was quiet and loyal, a mature young man who gave every decision careful thought, says Turner, who helped raise him after his parents died. "He didn’t jump into anything," she recalls. "He was very meticulous and organized."
Hawk Eagle was a talented artist who loved to draw and paint and a classic car buff who knew every model he saw on the road. Hawk Eagle also adored kids and talked about a career in child psychology, looking to the Army to pay for college. But the military turned out to be such a good fit, his aunt says, he thought it might be his life.
"He loved it and everything about it," she says. "He said, ’This is where I need to be right now.’"
Other American Indian troops have died in Iraq, including Army specialist Lori Piestewa, a Hopi believed to be the first American Indian woman killed while fighting for the U.S. military.
Friends and family mourned and celebrated Hawk Eagle’s life in two days of ceremonies that featured tribal drums, Lakota songs and prayers, an overnight vigil and, his aunt says, the presentation of a red feather — akin to a Purple Heart.
A procession led by a riderless horse covered with a red, white and blue blanket and a wagon carrying the flag-draped coffin made its way through the streets of Eagle Butte, S.D. Hawk Eagle’s sister, Frankie, removed her brother’s yellow ribbon from a tree outside the high school gymnasium, where more than 1,000 people gathered.
Hawk Eagle’s funeral was held at sunrise, then a cortege made the 150-mile journey to the Black Hills National Cemetery, where a Black Hawk helicopter flew overhead in tribute.
"The sun was shining. That was good," his aunt says. "But it was a hard day. It was so hard."
Amanda Brown / Star Ledger via AP
When Frank T. Carvill told his sister he had been called up to go to Iraq, she was stunned.
"Gee, Frank, are you going to be part of the AARP battalion?" she teased, referring to the retirees lobbying group.
At 51, Carvill, an Army sergeant with the New Jersey National Guard, was among the oldest soldiers to die in Iraq. He was killed last June in an ambush outside Baghdad that also claimed the lives of four other Guard members from New Jersey and Oregon.
Carvill had escaped both terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, where he worked as a paralegal. In 1993, he helped a co-worker down 54 floors to safety. On Sept. 11, 2001, he left the north tower moments before one of the hijacked planes plowed into the building.
Carvill was a voracious reader who loved politics, an outdoorsman who enjoyed kayaking, a trusted friend who had the same buddies for 30 years.
He was a devoted big brother to Peggy Liguori, who still remembers how as kids, he took her to see "Blue Hawaii" and "Born Free" at the movies. He was the longtime pal to Rick Rancitelli who admired Carvill’s "million-dollar vocabulary" and his writing and public speaking skills.
Carvill joined the Guard two decades ago out of a sense of patriotism and never regretted it, though he believed the war in Iraq was a political mistake, Rancitelli says.
Rancitelli sent his friend copies of The New Yorker, military history books and Grateful Dead music. He also e-mailed him photos of a lake house he recently bought — a perfect spot to decompress when Carvill returned.
"Just get home, everything else will be gravy," he wrote Carvill.
But on the day he was supposed to head home on leave, he gave up his seat on the plane to another soldier who had a family emergency, according to his sister.
"My brother’s biggest downfall was never being able to say no," Liguori says. "He was always willing to help."
He was killed, she says, that day he gave up his seat.
In May, Carvill sent friends an e-mail, saying he was trying to make the best of the situation but was looking forward to joining them for dinner back home.
He also offered some reflections about the war that turned out to be prophetic.
"Our occupation is not intended to be forever," he wrote. "I don’t know how we can get out in the short run. We as a nation are going to have absorb huge costs, both in money and in lives, for several more years...."
One month later, he was dead.
The Wellsville Daily Reporter via AP
Jason Dunham stepped into the role of protector long before he ever donned a Marine uniform.
As a teenager, he put himself between a friend and an adversary to protect his buddy during a fight. As a brother, he would warn his little sister to watch out for boys. As a man, he dreamed of becoming a state trooper — so long as work didn’t take him too far from home, where he could keep an eye on those he loved most.
Dunham died as he had lived, said the minister at his burial last May: "Caring more for others than himself."
He has been nominated for the Medal of Honor, given for extraordinary valor without regard to one’s safety.
On April 14, the 22-year-old corporal from Scio, N.Y., was patrolling a vehicle checkpoint near Husaybah, Iraq, when a man leapt from a car and snatched Dunham by his throat. As Dunham wrestled with his attacker, he apparently spotted a grenade in the Iraqi’s hand and shouted a warning to other Marines rushing to his aid.
Marine officials would later conclude that Dunham dived onto the explosive and covered it with his helmet to shield his comrades. He died a week later at a U.S. hospital, his parents by his side. His mother, Deb, held one hand. His father, Dan, clasped the other.
"He never opened his eyes," his mother said.
Dunham is among several Americans in the Iraq war who gave their lives to save another. Marine Sgt. Kirk Straseskie, 23, of Beaver Dam, Wis., drowned after he jumped into a canal to rescue victims of a helicopter crash. Army Sgt. Jaror Puello-Coronado, 36, of Pocono Summit, Pa., was hit by an out-of-control truck after he pushed another soldier out of its path.
Dunham is the first person in this conflict to be recommended for the nation’s highest military honor, according to Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y. In a letter asking President Bush to approve the Medal of Honor nomination, Schumer noted that Dunham’s "unbelievable bravery and selflessness" saved the lives of at least two other Marines.
"I can imagine no clearer a case of an individual soldier exhibiting the ideals that the Congressional Medal was established to honor."
Dunham’s mother says they were ideals her son displayed all his life.
"He was a hero before this," she said. "It didn’t take this for us to find that out."
The number stood at 1,001 on Tuesday, including three civilian contractors working for the Defense Department. About 7,000 other Americans have been wounded.
Of those who have died, 97 percent were men; two dozen were women. While more than 600 were white, others were black, Hispanic, Asian and American Indian — including the first Indian woman killed in combat while fighting for the U.S. military and a Cheyenne River Sioux who traced his ancestry to two great chiefs, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull.
There were kids who had never fired a shot at an enemy and veterans of Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo — even Vietnam.
They hailed from the urban bustle of Chicago, New York and Houston, as well as the cornfields of Silvana, Wash., and the coal mine country of Varney, W.Va. — and from every state but Alaska.
They represented U.S. territories: American Samoa, the Northern Marianas, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
More than three dozen were born in foreign countries — including Thailand, India, Albania, Poland, Nicaragua, Colombia and the United Arab Emirates — but ended up fighting for a nation they embraced as their own.
While many had been naturalized, at least 10 died reaching for their vision of the American dream: to become U.S. citizens.
Army Pfc. Diego Rincon, a native of Colombia, was among them. After he was killed in a suicide bombing, his father, Jorge, lobbied Congress, which passed legislation giving posthumous citizenship to his 19-year-old son and other foreign-born soldiers killed in battle.
“It’s good it happened — but at the same time, he’s not here to enjoy it,” Jorge Rincon says. “He was supposed to be here.”
Jose Gutierrez grew up an orphan on the streets of Guatemala, rode rail cars to California, crossed the border illegally, obtained a visa and graduated from high school, then joined the Marines. At age 28, the lance corporal was buried in his native land, a U.S. flag covering his casket.
In a poem called “Letter to God,” Gutierrez once wrote: “Thank you for permitting me to live another year. Thank you for what I have, for the type of person I am, for my dreams that don’t die.”
(The Iraq war also has claimed the lives of more than 120 foreign troops who are part of the U.S.-led coalition; about half were in the British military. Nearly 100 Americans have died in operations in Afghanistan, along with 35 others in related action in Pakistan and other countries.)
Public memorials to those lost in the Iraq war have taken many forms: rows and rows of combat boots in a traveling exhibit; crosses covering a California beach; baseballs, each marked with a name, at a Massachusetts park. Anti-war protesters carried hundreds of flag-draped, coffin-shaped boxes through the streets of New York.
Although most — more than 700 — were in the Army, Americans who died wore the uniforms of every branch of service, including the first Coast Guardsman to die in combat since Vietnam.
More than three-fourths were in the active-duty military. But with the largest deployment of Guard and Reserve units since World War II, about 18 percent of those who died were part-time troops: 109 National Guard members and 74 reservists. Thirteen were from a single Army National Guard brigade based in Arkansas.
About 70 percent were killed in action, many in roadside explosions while on patrol or making supply runs, rocket-propelled grenade attacks that took down helicopters, sniper shootings and suicide bombings.
There were more than 160 accidental deaths, many involving vehicles, and at least 27 suicides. Twelve people were lost in so-called friendly fire incidents, Central Command reported.
Numbers are only part of the story
Those who died were as different as they were the same: Homecoming kings and class presidents, Scout leaders and Little League coaches. A young man from the projects who put a hip-hop beat to “Amazing Grace” on the bus to church camp. A lawyer fascinated with tanks. An Army specialist nicknamed Ketchup who would sneak food to Iraqi children. A National Guardsman who once dyed his hair blue and red for an Independence Day parade.
There was Trevor Spink, a 36-year-old staff sergeant in his third tour in Iraq. His steady, confident gaze was once the face on Marine recruitment posters. Now, his mother has decided, that portrait will adorn his tombstone.
His friends still marvel at his transformation when he donned his Marine uniform. “It was as if God had dropped Trevor into life’s slot of complete comfort,” one wrote in a condolence note to his mother.
There was Army pilot Aaron Weaver, 32, who had survived cancer and a rocket attack in the 1993 battle of Mogadishu, Somalia, that was recounted in “Black Hawk Down.” The Bronze Star recipient and father of a baby girl was so determined to go to Iraq that he secured special medical clearance so he could fly.
“Nobody wants to leave their buddies behind,” says his father, Mike Weaver. “Being an Army Ranger — it’s a close-knit family.”
So many were so very young, men and women just beginning lives filled with promise.
Marine Lance Cpl. Aaron Austin, 21, proposed to his fiancée, Tiffany Frank, by telephone from Iraq, then asked her to send him catalogues circling the engagement rings she liked best. They set a wedding date — Dec. 11. Tiffany had picked up her wedding gown the day she learned of his death.
“We had the church reserved, the pastor reserved, the reception hall reserved,” she says. “Everything was coming together. Now I can only dream about what we would have had.”
Roger Rowe already had everything he wanted: a 34-year marriage to his childhood friend, four children and seven grandchildren who called him “Papa” and for whom he planned to build a clubhouse. Still, at 54, the Vietnam veteran had no hesitation about serving in Iraq as part of the Tennessee National Guard.
“He said, ‘What a lifetime experience this will be to be able to help that country,’” remembers his widow, Shirley. “He was always an optimist.”
After Rowe was killed by a sniper, Guard members went to his home in Bon Aqua, Tenn., and built the clubhouse Papa promised.
The path to a better life
Army Pvt. Robert Frantz, 19, considered it a training ground for a career in law enforcement to support his young daughter.
“His buddies weren’t getting anywhere,” recalls his mother, Kim Smith. “I told him: ‘Son, you have a child. You have to do something.’ It motivated him. He wanted her to be proud of him.”
Brad Coleman had a job recommendation at a mine in Pennsylvania, but at 19, the Army private “wanted to get out and see the world,” says his father, Donald. “He felt with the war going on, he could lend a hand.”
James Adamouski also felt compelled to serve in Iraq, despite previous tours in Bosnia and Kosovo — and a bright future.
At 29, the Army captain already was accomplished: He was a West Point graduate and a former semiprofessional soccer player in Germany. He was about to start Harvard Business School, and he had his eye on a political career.
During a Memorial Day visit to the White House last year, his father, Frank Adamouski, spoke briefly with President Bush about what might have been. “I always knew I was going to have breakfast in the White House,” he recalls saying. “But I always thought my son was going to be president when I did.”
Army Pfc. Jesse Buryj had his own career plans — to become a Canton, Ohio, police officer. He enlisted because he was too young to be on the force.
The 21-year-old newlywed died a hero — one of many killed trying to help or protect others. Buryj was credited with saving fellow soldiers when he fired more than 400 rounds at a dump truck that was trying to crash a checkpoint near Karbala, Iraq.
“I know he went out in a blaze of glory,” says his mother, Peggy. “They say he showed no fear and gave no ground.”
Others expressed bitterness over the loss of loved ones in a war they considered unjustified.
“It just rubbed salt in the wound to hear them talk about ‘well, maybe they didn’t have all the information; maybe the intelligence was faulty,’” says Oliva Smith, whose 41-year-old husband, Bruce, was among 16 U.S. soldiers killed when a surface-to-air missile downed their helicopter.
If the war separated families, it also united them.
Michelle Witmer, 20, was serving in the Wisconsin National Guard with her twin, Charity, and a third sister, Rachel, when she was killed in an ambush in Baghdad. Her sisters returned home to complete their duty.
Kimberly Voelz, 27, and her husband, Max, both explosives experts, headed off to the war together. She died in his arms, killed by a makeshift bomb she was preparing to disarm. Max Voelz called her parents that morning, telling them: “She died 10 minutes ago.”
A void too great to fathom
More than 500 sons and daughters have been left without a father, and at least five boys and girls lost their mothers.
Sharon Swartworth, 43, was about to retire to Hawaii with her naval commander husband and their 8-year-old son when she was killed in a helicopter crash while on a mission to hand out medals. As lead adviser to the Army’s judge advocate general, she had a distinguished 26-year military career.
Her father, Bernard Mayo, says she wasn’t interested in discussing her work but would say: “Talk to me about my little boy, Billy.”
Two dozen soldiers had wives who were pregnant, men like 23-year-old Micheal Dooley, who had picked a name from afar for his first child.
Dooley was manning a traffic control post when the occupants of a car asked for help for a sick friend, then opened fire. His wife, Christine, was in her second trimester. Their daughter bears the name he chose, Shea Micheal Dooley.
“She’s so beautiful and she’s so much fun, and he’s not here to enjoy this,” says Christine, who lives with her parents in Murrysville, Pa. Sometimes, she and Shea go to the mausoleum where Dooley rests. Christine takes her daughter’s hand, presses it to her own lips and then to the wall of the crypt, telling her: “That’s the way we kiss Daddy.”
These 1,000 men and women are home again, their war over.
The Rincon house in Conyers, Ga., is filled with memories of Diego: His neatly pressed uniform is spread out on his bed, his drum set and his telescope are in his room, his yellow Mustang sits in the garage — just as he left them. His framed citizenship papers are on the wall.
Diego Rincon was cremated, but he has not been laid to rest. His family isn’t ready for the final goodbye.
“One day when I’m old,” his father says, “I’m going to bury him in Arlington. But not now. Not right now.”
© 2004 The Associated Press. All rights reserved
