I just wanted to take a brief moment to honor the 2002 fallen men & women in Iraq who made the ultimate sacrifice. Their death in a foreign country may go largely unnoticed by most people here in America (even those that talked so loudly about nuking the Arabs after 9-11); I hope every day that I am not one of those people. I deeply respect the courage it takes to go out on the front lines in the first place, and I am very troubled by the loss of even one of our fighters. When I see their faces on the news each night, or hear their names, or read or see about their losses, a sense of grief washes over me. I know that with each name and face a family is destroyed emotionally by the initial loss, and then later by the economic loss and finally by the missing loved one who should have been there, robbed by some politician’s plans (enemy or allied).

I would also like to honor the 15,000 + wounded casualties, a large portion of whom would normally be deaths. The miracles of modern science have given many a second …