"Never Forget"

Funerals are never fun. They make you reflect on your own life just a little bit. Make you look at just where you are in the world and where you want to be. For most people however there attendance of a funeral is rare. When deployed over here however it is an all too often occurrence. For me, in the 9 months I have been here, I have attended 17. Yes, 1- 7.

The battalion that I am attached to over here in Iraq lost another soldier just he other day. It hurts when we lose a guy. There aren’t a whole lot of us here on the FOB so whether you knew him well or not, you will definitely recognize his face. The guys I am with got here two months before my unit did putting them deep in the fourth quarter with just a little less than two months to go. Two months to go and he got hit. It’s awful.

We had his “Hero Ceremony” for him today. We all formed up in two rows with room in the middle for the stretcher team to carry the body bag draped in an American flag to the awaiting Blackhawk’s to carry him away. We all saluted as the body passed by and quietly said our goodbyes, dropped our salutes and filed to the right continuing on with the fight. The gears of war just keep grinding away, never stopping for much of anything.

I didn’t know the kid, I had seen his face but that was about it. Still doesn’t change the fact that he was the seventeenth soldier lost from the FOB. I have lost six from my company alone. A company that only consisted of 84 soldiers to begin with and 12 of them never leave the FOB. Hopefully this will be the last time I ever write a blog like this.