For You, I Remember

We tend to look out for our own.

The 4500 dead in Indonesia sent shockwaves to my own heart. The Afghan violence that hasn't been this high since the Taliban regime was disbanded five years ago is unsettling. Day after day, there are reports of soldiers who die this way and that way in the streets of Iraq, but I do not think it has hit this close to home for a while.

No relative, close friend, or role model was a victim of the war, neither is the attack anywhere within 1000 miles of where I am. But like how my Christian friends anguish over missionaries who are killed by those they are merely trying to love, I was the same way when I heard about the deaths of three more journalists working for CBS News. The cameraman, soundman, and correspondent for CBS News hit a roadside bomb in Baghdad. Paul Douglas, 48, and James Brolan, 42, died form the attack, and Kimberly Dozier, 39, the correspondent sustained serious injuries and now, doctors are "cautiously optimistic about her progress." An American soldier and Iraqi interpreter, also died in the attack.

It is a little fitting that on a day meant to mourn and remember the bravery of our soldiers, that in between our football games and barbecue chicken dinners, we still cannot escape the incessant violence in times of war. Anderson Cooper says it best in his new book, Dispatches from the Edge, as he remarks, "Human beings are essentially optimistic creatives." But in our optimism, smiles, and reverberating presidential calls to "return to normalcy," it is hard when we are looking at our own sons and daughters. I do not know many of us who know someone who has died in this recent war or know many people close to us who are actually fighting in it. So there is no wonder that we can distance ourselves through political theory and Bush ranting as some sort of an intellectual exercise, choosing when to cry and when to feel.

In this attack, however, they have become my own family - my own family of courageous men and women who has could not see themselves anything close to that. They, like me and countless other journalists, merely have an itch or addiction that no one can comprehend. When people are running away, we want to run towards the story. When I hear of the genocide in Sudan, it makes me want to take every adventurous route to get inside that country. The fact that death is a possibility makes it even more enticing. And so I told BJ that I "would love to be in these places of danger, and who knows, I might even die doing it" with a large grin across my face, both BJ and the other listeners around me thought they I have turned into a sick lover of pain. I'd rather see myself as painfully loving the sick in the world.

With these two casaulties, 71 journalists have died since the beginning of the Iraq War. On a day that focuses on the soldiers who courageously fight for our freedom, I will stand on my newspaper-covered room, put my hand against my forehead, and salute the men and women, who only had weapons that shot stories that captured the necessary tragedies and events we all want to know, but are too afraid to discover.