Sometimes I encounter something in my morning reading that moves me so profoundly that I just sit there in silence, perhaps struggling to breathe, perhaps, as was the case this morning, with my eyes moist.
J. Kaek Weston was a State Department official in Iraq whose post in the Sunday Review of today’s New York Timesis something I strongly urge that you read.
Its beginning paragraph only hints at its power:
IN his Pentagon office, Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has a picture of a war memorial in a working-class neighborhood of South Boston, his hometown. Dedicated in 1981, it commemorates local troops killed in Vietnam: 25 young men, several of them friends since childhood, died in combat there. Inscribed at the bottom of the polished black granite surface are the words “If you forget my death, then I died in vain.”
That is because Weston’s connection with Dunford goes back to Iraq, when he as a high-ranking civilian override Dunford, then a Brigadier General, and ordered Marines into Anbar Province to provide protection for a vote in the hopes it would increase participation. One helicopter, with 30 Marines and one Navy Corpsman, crashed, killing all on board.