Iraq hit home

"So tonight, I am announcing that the American combat mission in Iraq has ended."

President Obama in a speech on Aug. 31

Many Americans didn't even bother to watch President Obama's speech on Iraq last week. They didn't pay attention to the official end of the seven-year war they'd all but forgotten.

But the families of the more than 4,400 Americans killed in Iraq -- including several from our area -- never had that luxury. Nor did the more than 31,000 Americans who were wounded. The war will dog them and their families for years to come. We owe them our support and gratitude for putting their lives on hold, kissing their families goodbye and serving in deserts thousands of miles away.

Obama acknowledged their sacrifice, even as he acknowledged that there will be no tidy ending to the war that he inherited from President Bush. As he spoke, violence was escalating in the other war on terror, in Afghanistan. Six Americans were killed there Tuesday "ending August with a spike in bloodshed that has claimed the lives of 19 U.S. service members in only four days," The Associated Press reported. That brings the total of American troops killed there to more than 1,100.

We must rededicate ourselves to supporting the troops and their families, and to keeping their sacrifice alive in our public discourse, however we feel about the war. God forbid that our country ever again become so numb to war deaths that we relegate them to brief items in the back pages of newspapers, as happened in the Vietnam War. God forbid that the American death toll in Afghanistan ever gets as high as that of Vietnam -- more than 58,000.

The Iraq vets in our area should help us remember the troops in Afghanistan. And we should listen to what they can tell us about Iraq. "Generations of Iraqis have been told what to do and not given a hand out of poverty," Shermane McGriff, an Army sergeant who was wounded in 2004 on his second tour in Iraq, told the Journal's Richard Craver. "The next generation has seen and benefited from our efforts."

John Taylor, a Winston-Salem firefighter who served as a National Guard engineer in Iraq, said that "As an American, I felt we did our jobs well, fixing an infrastructure that was in pieces. We made it safer for the average Iraqi citizen, for the farmer, the storekeeper, the student."

Another Guardsman, Winston-Salem police officer Russell Barbee, said his unit took pride in ridding patrol routes of known terrorists by helping Iraqi police enforce warrants.

Local vets have mixed feelings about the war. While some are proud of taking out a ruthless dictator, others question the reason for the war. "I wonder if we'll ever come to terms with the fact that we started a war under false pretenses," Pat Rimron, a retired Army major, told the Journal's Scott Sexton. Rimron emphasized that he was speaking personally, and not for the Army. "We started a war. We didn't react to one and we weren't defending anything. The threat of an evil dictator didn't exist any more than it did in any number of other countries around the world," said Rimron, who was the commander of a security company that transported VIPs around Baghdad.

Yet Rimron is proud that he served his country, and proud of his soldiers. When troops are on the ground, they tend to disregard politics, concentrating instead on keeping each other alive.

Too many service members from Northwest North Carolina have died in Iraq. They are Marine Lance Cpl. David B. Houck of Winston-Salem; Army Sgt. Monta S. Ruth of Winston-Salem; Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class Christopher W. Thompson of Millers Creek; Marine Lance Cpl. Daniel F. Swaim of Yadkinville; Army Pfc. Adam L. Marion of Dobson; and Army National Guard 1st Lt. Leevi K. Barnard of Mount Airy.

Their deaths, and those of all the others in Iraq and Afghanistan, will leave big holes in their families and communities for generations to come. Many of those killed were stalwarts, our friends and neighbors who manned volunteer fire departments, taught Sunday school and coached Little League. A few might have accomplished great things, such as finding cures for diseases or becoming national leaders.

The vets returning from Iraq are also among our finest. We should insist that the Department of Veterans Affairs provide them with the best in care for physical and mental scars -- we haven't always done that -- and that the government provide them with full access to higher education through the G.I. Bill. Most of all, we should embrace them, and the vets of the Afghan war -- the end of which can't come soon enough -- and keep them close.