Michael Yon's latest.

I just read the latest dispatch from Michael Yon and I'm as heartbroken as ever. All I can say is I will continue praying for all those who fight, and all those who have fallen. Please read the full dispatch here.

Under Distant Stars


...Soon after my embed with the 2-7 CAV ended, I made one other visit to a CSH. Among the many wounded was one soldier who had been terribly maimed by an IED during an ambush. It is hard to describe the extent of his injuries. These CSHs host a daily array of gunshot wounds of every description, traumatic amputations, and severe burns, but his wounds were horrible even by those standards. As blood soaked through his bandages, a pretty young nurse walked out into the hall and burst into tears. A doctor called the soldier’s father, and gravely related the truth: the staff would try to keep him alive until Germany, so his family could be there at the end.

The soldier who had been ambushed by the IED in Iraq was expected to die very soon. I was a few feet away when a call came in from a close family member. The family member did not inquire about his condition or what happened. This family member only wanted to know when the soldier would die, and who would receive his death benefit. In less civilized times, people like that roamed the battlefield with tools to pry gold teeth from the jaws of fallen soldiers, but it was distressing to imagine that a family member would do the same.

It’s been many months since the soldier was killed with the IED, and the subsequent call asking who would get the money for his death, and then his organs were harvested. I think about him often, even though we never met until his brain was dead and his body was only barely alive. The impact of his life and death might seem like a tiny, twinkling star in the heavens: so dim, most people would never see it; or if they did, it might not seem so memorable arrayed against so many other faint specks of glowing dust. Like the dimmest stars to our straining eyes, his life might seem distant and his death irrelevant to people searching for meaning in the loss of yet another soldier.

That obligatory Army-issue newspaper announcement might be the only formal recognition he will ever get for dying in service to his country. But it won’t be the greatest one, not by far. And not for those who saw the young nurse crying for him, or the stoic wash of tears that stained the battle-weary faces of his buddies, gathered in combat gear to see him off.