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With Iraq War Come Layers of Loss
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"It has put into perspective what is really important, and that's my family," Boone said in October at a base outside Baghdad. "But I'm willing to give my life for this."
Still, "it's rough," he said. "You miss your kids' first this, first that." His youngest son, Marcus, is 3. More than half of U.S. troops deployed overseas are married, according to Pentagon statistics.
The members of the 2-10 Mountain take pride in their many deployments. 1st Sgt. David Schumacher, 37, of Watertown, N.Y., has been to Iraq three times and has deployed a total of eight times, going back to his tour in Somalia.
"I love what I do," Schumacher said in a recent interview in Yusufiyah, Iraq. "This is what I signed up for. But I'd like to let my family enjoy me for more than a few months at a time."
Maj. Mitchell Watkins, 40, of Vonore, Tenn., has had seven operational deployments in his career and is on his third tour in Iraq, now as the executive officer of the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, based in Tall Afar. Watkins said that each combat death is intensely tragic -- he lost one of his closest friends during his last tour -- but that what the troops have given for their country should never be forgotten.
"I willfully continue to serve here because I believe that our sacrifice is still appreciated by many Iraqis who desire to truly be free, and by the people at home who are supporting us," Watkins said in November. "Having lost two close personal friends here in this war and almost 3,000 comrades, I understand the sacrifice this presents to my family, but I have no regrets."
Hitting Home
After paying tribute to President Gerald R. Ford as he lay in state over the weekend, Katy Dotson, a high school teacher from West Milford, N.J., said she struggles with the number of American lives that have been lost in the Iraq war. Dotson, 24, said she recently sat in on a colleague's current-events class and was struck to see how little the students knew about the conflict and its victims.
"Most Americans don't understand that people are numbers and numbers are people," she said. They grasp the gravity of the situation only when tragedy strikes close to home. "We had one young man die from our town," she said. "It was a very big deal. The post office was renamed after him."
Staff writer Ernesto Londoño contributed to this report.
