This past month I was walking up at the campus, just another November day in my life. There was a memorial that some students had put up which was dedicated to American soldiers who have died in Iraq. Hundreds of them. I can't imagine what those soldiers saw.
There were photographs and stories about each soldier; their age, how they died. Those faces, all of them with childhoods and stories and birthdays. Some of them 22 some of them 45 years old, all of them lost in some abstract place that's far away. I hear about this war every day on the radio, on the internet, in the newspapers. This is another war that will be taught in history classes someday, one among many. Just another war.
I was reading the names, looking at those faces, and trying to make myself feel how real those faces and experiences were. All of them. Real people, over there in Iraq, are dying on two sides of a conflict while most of us drive to work, eat, shop, and continue on in our lives.
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