When the dust of war settles, the dying is not done
CALVIN WOODWARD, Associated Press Writer Saturday, May 24, 2003
(05-24) 09:51 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --
Wars produce their famous figures of battle and those who are remembered namelessly, at the Tomb of the Unknowns. On Memorial Day, Americans will also mourn a group of little-knowns.
They are the postwar dead from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not soldiers killed in the heat of battles keenly watched by the nation, but those who died after the big fights were won, the most pressing military goals achieved, when Americans had stopped paying attention.
From May Day to the weekend lead-up to Memorial Day, more than 20 Americans died in support of the Iraq occupation. They were killed in crashes, from ordnance that exploded by mistake and from attacks by an enemy that is beaten but not gone.
On May 1, President Bush declared the end of major combat in Iraq in a showy visit to an aircraft carrier steaming home under a banner that said, "Mission Accomplished."
An hour after the speech, Army Pfc. Jesse A. Givens' family in Missouri got word that he died that day when his tank plunged down a bank into the Euphrates River. He left a wife, Melissa, due to give birth next month, and a 5-year-old stepson, Dakota.
More deaths followed. These were not usually from feats of derring-do, like the bold dash across the desert of the U.S.-British invading force, the plunge into the heart of Baghdad or the siege of Basra.
Instead, a sniper killed Army Pfc. Marlin Rockhold, 23, of Hamilton, Ohio, as he directed traffic on a Baghdad bridge.
On Monday, four Marines died when their transport helicopter crashed into a canal in central Iraq during a routine resupply flight. A fifth, Marine Infantry Sgt. Kirk Straseskie, 23, of Beaver Dam, Wis., drowned trying to save them.
"We told him not to be a hero," said his grandmother, Jan Helmer. "But that was Kirk."
A day earlier, Army Spc. Rasheed Sahib, 22, of New York City, was killed when a fellow soldier's weapon fired while he was cleaning it. He lived in Brooklyn, and his nickname was Smiley. His family had come from Guyana in 1988, and his ambition was to become an FBI agent.
All wars have their quiet heroes and unsung victims, the ones who have to stick around to finish the job and then get unlucky.
In the Afghanistan war, CIA officer Johnny "Mike" Spann became the first American to die in combat -- and a household name -- eight weeks into the fighting, when he was killed during the Mazar-e-Sharif prison uprising.
Most American casualties in Afghanistan came well after the fall of Kabul and other Taliban strongholds. At least 47 died after Hamid Karzai was sworn in as interim chairman on Dec. 22, 2001, marking the end of Taliban rule but not the end of the war by a long shot.
On March 23, on a day when America was riveted by a battery of bad news from Iraq -- up to nine Marines dead, a dozen Army soldiers attacked and missing, a British warplane downed by U.S. friendly fire -- a helicopter crash in Afghanistan reminded everyone that Americans were dying in a nearly forgotten operation, too.
The six people on the Air Force chopper were on a mercy mission to help two injured Afghan children when it went down.
On the same day that Bush said major combat in Iraq was done, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made a similar declaration about Afghanistan. Both said more danger was ahead.
Indeed, at least 40 of the more than 160 American deaths from the Iraq war have happened since April 9, when U.S. commanders declared Baghdad free of Saddam Hussein's government and crowds toppled a huge statue of their former president.
A mission was accomplished that day. But nearly one-quarter of the U.S. fatalities were still to come. |
