In Memoriam

[Grace]

22 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Sgt. 1st Class Carlos M. Santos-Silva, 32, of Clarksville, Tenn., died March 22 in Kandahar province, Afghanistan of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C

[Grace]

24 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the deaths of two Marines who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

The following Marines died March 24 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan:

Sgt. Maj. Robert J. Cottle, 45, of Whittier, Calif.

Lance Cpl. Rick J. Centanni, 19, of Yorba Linda, Calif.

Cottle and Centanni were assigned to 4th Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 4thMarine Division, Marine Forces Reserve, based out of Camp Pendleton, Calif.

[Grace]

24 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lance Cpl. Jacob A. Ross, 19, of Gillette, Wyo., died March 24, while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan. He was assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

[Grace]

28 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a Marine who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lance Cpl. Randy M. Heck, 20, of Steubenville, Ohio, died March 28 from a non-hostile incident in Djibouti, Africa. He was assigned to 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

This incident is under investigation.

[Grace]

Great Britain

Lance Cpl. of Horse Jonathan Woodgate, 26, Lavenham, Suffolk, England
The Household Cavalry Regiment, attached to 4 Troop, Brigade Reconnaissance Force

Killed when a grenade was thrown from behind a wall during a foot patrol operating about 1.8 miles (3 km) south of Sangin district center in Helmand province, Afghanistan, on March 26, 2010

[Grace]

Great Britain

Rifleman Daniel Holkham, 19, Chatham, Kent, England
Company B, 3rd Battalion, The Rifles

Killed when a sucide bomber detonated an explosive device just outside the bazaar in Sangin, Helmand province, Afghanistan, on March 27, 2010

[RICHARD]

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ob..._in_air_force/


Saw this in a review of the people that had passed so far this year.

Somehow, she made the list of stars and other people in the 'spotlight' that left, too......

[Grace]

29 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Pfc. James L. Miller, 21, of Yakima, Wash., died March 29 in Dashat, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when insurgents attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 5th Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division, Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash.

[Grace]

29 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a soldier who was supporting Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Pfc. Raymond N. Pacleb, 31, of Honolulu, Hawaii, died March 29 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sustained from a non-combat related incident. He was assigned to the 1st Battalion, 487th Field Artillery Regiment, Wahiawa, Hawaii.

[Grace]

Great Britain

It is with sadness that the Ministry of Defence must confirm that Guardsman Michael Sweeney, 19, from Blyth in Northumberland; 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards was killed in Afghanistan on 1 April 2010.

Guardsman Sweeney died as a result of an explosion that happened in the Babaji District of central Helmand province.

[Grace]

From the NY Times

April 3, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
We Still Don’t Hear Him
By BOB HERBERT

The great man was moving with what seemed like great reluctance. He knew as he climbed from the car in Upper Manhattan that he was stepping into the maelstrom, that there were powerful people who would not react kindly to what he had to say.

“I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight,” said the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”

This was on the evening of April 4, 1967, almost exactly 43 years ago. Dr. King told the more than 3,000 people who had crowded into Riverside Church that silence in the face of the horror that was taking place in Vietnam amounted to a “betrayal.”

He spoke of both the carnage in the war zone and the toll the war was taking here in the United States. The speech comes to mind now for two reasons: A Tavis Smiley documentary currently airing on PBS revisits the controversy set off by Dr. King’s indictment of “the madness of Vietnam.” And recent news reports show ever-increasing evidence that we have ensnared ourselves in a mad and tragic venture in Afghanistan.

Dr. King spoke of how, in Vietnam, the United States increased its commitment of troops “in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support.”

It’s strange, indeed, to read those words more than four decades later as we are increasing our commitment of troops in Afghanistan to fight in support of Hamid Karzai, who remains in power after an election that the world knows was riddled with fraud and whose government is one of the most corrupt and inept on the planet.

If Mr. Karzai is at all grateful for this support, he has a very peculiar way of showing it. He has ignored pleas from President Obama and others to take meaningful steps to rein in the rampant corruption. His brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the kingpin in southern Afghanistan, is believed by top American officials to be engaged in all manner of nefarious activities, including money-laundering and involvement in the flourishing opium trade.

Hamid Karzai himself pulled off a calculated insult to the U.S. by inviting Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidential palace in Kabul, where Ahmadinejad promptly delivered a fiery anti-American speech. As Dexter Filkins and Mark Landler reported in The Times this week: “Even as Mr. Obama pours tens of thousands of additional American troops into the country to help defend Mr. Karzai’s government, Mr. Karzai now often voices the view that his interests and the United States’ no longer coincide.”

Is this what American service members are dying for in Afghanistan? Can you imagine giving up your life, or your child’s life, for that crowd?

In his speech, Dr. King spoke about the damage the Vietnam War was doing to America’s war on poverty, and the way it was undermining other important domestic initiatives. What he wanted from the U.S. was not warfare overseas but a renewed commitment to economic and social justice at home. As he put it: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

The speech set loose a hurricane of criticism. Even the N.A.A.C.P. complained that Dr. King should stick to what it perceived as his area of expertise, civil rights. The New York Times headlined its editorial on the speech, “Dr. King’s Error.”

Mr. Smiley, in his documentary, noted that “the already strained relationship between President Johnson and Dr. King became fractured beyond repair.” And donations to Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference “began to dry up.”

So it took great courage for Dr. King to speak out as he did.

His bold stand seems all the more striking in today’s atmosphere, in which moral courage among the very prominent — the kind of courage that carries real risk — seems mostly to have disappeared.

More than 4,000 Americans have died in Iraq and more than 1,000 in Afghanistan, where the Obama administration has chosen to escalate rather than to begin a careful withdrawal. Those two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have told us, will ultimately cost us more than $3 trillion.

And yet the voices in search of peace, in search of an end to the “madness,” in search of the nation-building so desperately needed here in the United States, are feeble indeed.

Dr. King would be assassinated exactly one year (almost to the hour) after his great speech at Riverside Church. It’s the same terrible fate that awaits some of the American forces, most of them very young, that we continue to send into the quagmire in Afghanistan.

[Grace]

31 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of a pilot who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

Lt. Miroslav Zilberman, 31, of Columbus, Ohio, died after his E-2C Hawkeye crashed into the Arabian Gulf on March 31, 2010. The recovery effort was abandoned on April 2, 2010 and his body was not recovered. Zilberman was assigned to Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron (VAW) 121.

[Grace]

1 April 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of two Marines who were supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.

The following Marines died April 1 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan:

Lance Cpl. Tyler O. Griffin, 19, of Voluntown, Conn.

Sgt. Frank J. World, 25, of Buffalo, N.Y.

Griffin was assigned to 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

World was assigned to 2nd Light Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 2nd Marine Division, II Marine Expeditionary Force, Camp Lejeune, N.C.

[Grace]

From the NY Times -

The New York Times

April 6, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Turning Our Backs on Heroes
By BOB HERBERT

Arlington, Va.

While growing up just outside of Chicago, Dennet Oregon dreamed of being an artist. He loved to draw. He enrolled in art school after high school, but then came the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He left art school at the age of 19 and joined the Army.

“Sept. 11th was the main reason I joined,” he said, “but there were other underlying reasons as well. I was just poor, and I was tired of being poor. And tuition was kind of high. I called recruiters and we talked about the benefits of the G.I. bill, etc. And I figured, ‘Hey, join the Army and then get out and school would be paid for.’ ”

Mr. Oregon was assigned to the infantry and found that he liked it. He enjoyed the travel, the sense of adventure and the camaraderie with fellow soldiers. He wasn’t crazy about the danger, but, over all, he found the Army agreeable. At the end of four years, he re-enlisted.

“I got hurt March 29, 2005,” he said.

“Got hurt” was an understatement. Mr. Oregon, by then a sergeant, was in the lead truck of a convoy passing through a treacherous village not far from firebase Cobra, in the province of Uruzgan in central Afghanistan.

There was an uneasy feeling in the convoy that bordered on dread. Villagers gathered to stare at the American soldiers. “They stopped what they were doing,” said Sergeant Oregon, “and they were all eyeballing us.”

Everybody in the convoy was thinking I.E.D.: improvised explosive device. As Sergeant Oregon explained, “The road paralleled a river, and between the road and the river was just mud. If you tried to go through the mud, you would only get stuck. So the road was the only way.”

As he recalled the incident during an interview one recent afternoon at his apartment, Mr. Oregon said, “Everybody was scared. I remember saying to my driver, ‘As long as I don’t lose my hands, I’m fine.’ Because I like to draw, you know? ‘As long as I don’t lose my hands.’ ”

Some of the soldiers climbed out of the trucks to hunt for a device. But they didn’t spot anything. The bomb had been buried and paved over with concrete. It was detonated remotely as Sergeant Oregon’s truck passed over it.

A buddy of Sergeant Oregon’s lost his right leg. Sergeant Oregon was the most seriously wounded. He lost both legs. Each was amputated just below the knee. He also suffered a traumatic brain injury, three fractured vertebrae and cuts to his face and head.

There is a strong tendency, in our collective national consciousness, to give short shrift to the many thousands of Americans who are suffering grievously as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The wars have become like white noise in our culture. They hit the front pages from time to time, and there are evenings when some aspect of the wars are featured on the national news telecasts. But we have no real sense of the extraordinary sacrifices that have been made by the young men and women who are fighting these wars in our name.

The agony for many of the wounded has been all but unbearable — those who have lost limbs or been paralyzed or horribly burned, or who lost their hearing or eyesight.

The suffering extends to the families and loved ones of the wounded, and in all too many cases will last throughout their lives. These are peculiar wars in that the impact on the warriors inevitably is profound, while the effect of the wars on most other Americans is minimal.

There is something shameful — dishonorable — about relegating these warriors to the background. We sent them into hell and we owe them, at the very least, our grateful acknowledgement of their tremendous efforts and boundless sacrifices. There is no way to do that without paying serious attention to them.

Dennet Oregon, who now walks with prosthetic legs and works in an office at the Pentagon, is but one of many wounded soldiers piecing their lives back together after their encounters with catastrophe.

During a recent visit to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, I spent some time in the Military Advanced Training Center, a remarkable facility where dozens of recent amputees — under the guidance of an extraordinarily talented and dedicated staff — were engaged in the arduous task of physical rehabilitation.

Nearly 1,000 service members have lost limbs as a result of the two wars, and nearly 200 have lost more than one limb. More than 17,000 G.I.’s serving in Iraq or Afghanistan have suffered wounds so serious that they could not be returned to duty.

These wounded service members, many of them quite young, deserve much more of our awareness and support than they are getting.

[Grace]

30 March 2010

The Department of Defense announced today the death of one soldier who was supporting Operation Enduring Freedom.


Staff Sgt. Scott W. Brunkhorst, 25, Fayetteville, N.C., died March 30 in the Arghandab River Valley, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device. He was assigned to 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, Fort Bragg, N.C.