"There's A Flag Wrapped Around The Score Of Men"

The number that can not escape comment this weekend is one thousand. This is the unfortunate milestone that was reached last Thursday. Marine Corporal Jacob C. Leicht died that day, when he stepped on a mine. He was born, for ironic contrast, on the Fourth of July. He was twenty-four. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine stories that preceded his. One thousand GIs have been killed in Afghanistan.
That number fails to reflect the number of civilian casualties, or the number of wounded men and women whose lives have been changed forever as a result of the war. Sometimes lives don't end in death. Sometimes they just get taken away. On this Memorial Day, the sad fact is that we continue to count. Like the old George Carlin bit where he played a news guy on the radio announcing that the highway death toll for the holiday weekend was down from the year before: "Come on guys - you're not trying!"
Another wreath gets laid. Another grim salute at the tomb of the unknown soldier. Another sale at Macy's. Corporal Leicht had begged to return to the battlefield after a bomb took out his Humvee in Iraq. He spent two painful years recovering from face and leg injuries, all the while pining for combat in letters from his hospital bed. In his second tour of duty, he got his wish. Back home, we got another soldier ready to follow orders. To serve. To do his duty. To die for his country.
But he wasn't in his country. He was in Afghanistan. He died doing a job for which very few of us would volunteer. He gave up a college ROTC scholarship because he didn't want to get stuck behind a desk. Ron Kovic left college to volunteer for the Marines. He went to Vietnam. On his second tour of duty in 1968, he was wounded and paralyzed from the chest down. He has spent the past forty years speaking out about the human cost of war. He writes a blog. He was born on the Fourth of July. Dates, numbers, loss.