5 years on, Iraq war has changed lives

[Lone_Star_Dem]

Laura Youngblood clutched her husband's photo as she drove alone to the hospital. She'd become pregnant nearly nine months earlier, the day he'd left for training for Iraq. Hours later, after the baby was born, she placed the photo in the bassinet next to the infant he'd named Emma in his last letter home. He would never hold her.

Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis L. Youngblood, 26, had died two months earlier, killed by an improvised explosive device.

Laura Youngblood is just 29 years old, but she insists she will not remarry. Her life is her children, now ages 2 and 7. One day, she says, she'll be buried in the plot with her husband at Arlington National Cemetery.

"I tell people I'm a happily married woman," she says, crying.

<snip>

"'How did I end up in this kind of a situation?' There were a lot of guys that said that," says Jeff Myers, 48, a tech sergeant in the Pennsylvania Air National Guard from Pillow, Pa. His lips still discharge shrapnel shreds, the residue of two roadside bombs he survived in 2004; a neurologist monitors the concussions he sustained.

In his job as a gunner guarding Army convoys, he saw men so paralyzed by fear they wouldn't go outside the wire. He saw others die 15 minutes after he was chatting with them.

<snip>

Some can tell you exactly when their lives changed.

For Hazel Hoffman, from outside Grand Rapids, Mich., it was when the phone rang and she learned her son, Josh, was shot by a sniper. He was left a quadriplegic, unable to speak.

"I cried so hard that I had tears of blood. I remember looking down wondering, where is all this blood coming from? And it took a few seconds for me to realize this was coming out of me," says Hoffman, who has lived more than a year in an apartment with her son's girlfriend near his hospital in Richmond, Va.

Suzanne Stack, 48, was soaking in the bathtub in their house at Fort Campbell, Ky., when the doorbell rang. There were two officers at the door.

Afterward, still numb from the news of her husband's death, she walked her kids to the school bus. She sensed that people were looking at her fearfully, as if they were afraid they would be next. Even before the funeral, one spouse told her there was a waiting list for post housing. When would she be moving out?

<snip>

Recently, an Iraq veteran came to Daniel Fox's office and asked to take a screening exam for post-traumatic stress disorder a second time. He'd lied the first time, he said.

"When I asked him why he wasn't honest, he said because I had just gotten home and everybody's like saying, 'Welcome home hero,'" Fox says. "And how could he tell him that this hero was not doing well?"

<snip>

Before Travis Youngblood left for Iraq, he and his wife watched a TV interview with a pregnant woman whose husband had died in Iraq. Laura Youngblood cried.

"I felt so sorry for her," Youngblood says.

But then, "When my husband died, my first words were, 'I became her.'"

More at link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080308/ap_on_re_us/5_years_in_iraq_changed_lives

[Briar]

1. Actually

it has ended over one million Iraqi lives. This article doesn't mention them, or their bereaved friends and relatives.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

2. Which if you read my journal you'll see I share your concern on such matters

However, it's vital the citizens of the United States see how it's impacted those here as well. Articles such as this will go far toward shifting people's attitudes from another warmonger-in-chief.

All things considered, write-ups such as this one are also important.