101 US Soldiers are dead this month and one mother still weeps

One hundred and one soldiers have been killed this month in Iraq. That number may not seem like a lot to those who support this war, but for myself and others the number signifies a tragedy.

When one soldier dies, a whole community mourns and will so for years to come.

Today I met an extraordinary elderly woman in her early 80’s. She is the sister of one of my housecleaning customers who is 70 and is currently fighting a terminal disease (scholeraderma…in her case her lungs are hardening). My customer was not there because she went to the hospital last night because she had stopped breathing. Betty came by the house to do a load of laundry and to make dinner for her sister’s husband for when he gets home.

It wasn’t too long until her and I started up a conversation. She told me she’s going to miss her sister when she dies (she has less than 6 weeks to live and this is why I’ve been called in to help too) and was concerned for Mary’s husband who is not well himself. I asked her if her husband was alive and she suddenly got very quiet. I felt kind of uncomfortable because I thought that maybe I had asked something too personal after only knowing her for an hour.

She said, “My husband died in the Vietnam war”. After a few seconds of pause, I gave her my condolences and she said, “Everytime I turn on the news today and I hear that a soldier has died in this rotten, stinking Iraq war, I cry for the mothers and the families who have to deal with this type of loss. A death from war is not the same as a death in a car accident. Our children are not in our country when they die and they die without their family near them.”

Betty, whom I had only known for an hour at least, and I cried together this afternoon. She’s right when she says that having a loved one die in a war, even when the family knows it is a possibility, is a tragedy and it’s a tragedy that continues for a lifetime for the family affected.

Betty still longs for her husband and I could see it in her eyes. I asked her how her husband had died. She said he was on an aircraft that had just loaded up with bombs and had just taken off to drop bombs on a village when a huge gust of wind tore the plane apart (apparently the planes back then were made cheaply because they went through so many during the Vietnam war) and it crashed. Betty’s husband and the others who were on that flight did not survive. What still haunts Betty today is that there were no remains of her husband to be buried. She misses him terribly and has spent the last 38 years single and plans to remain that way until she dies.

So, one hundred and one deaths in the month of October 2006 is a huge number to those of us who don’t understand what noble cause the Iraq war is being fought for and those of us who don’t understand what war is good for.

Being with Betty today made me realize that there are thousands of people in our country connected to these soldiers who have sacrificed and they are going through exactly what Betty has gone through all these years. She understands their pain and now so do I.