KILLEEN, Texas - Take two steps through the front entrance of Shoemaker High School near Fort Hood, and the price of war becomes impossible to ignore. Seven gold stars hang above the doors, honoring seven parents killed in Iraq.“It's really hard to buy the gold ones,” says guidance counselor Barbara Critchfield, “Cause you know they're not coming back.”
Critchfield has been hanging stars since the Iraq war began, blue (for family members in the military) and silver (for family members wounded in war). For some families, there's a star for both parents.
“We've got at least 2,000 that are up throughout the building,” she says.
Want to see quiet dignity and grace in adversity? Watch the girl at the end of the video, 14-year-old Meghan Nelom. If you're not interested in the video of her, which just oozes strength of character, here's what the article says:
Fourteen-year-old Meghan Nelom's dad was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad. He told her not to cry if he died, that he was doing something important. So is she.“He wanted me to keep on going to school,” she says, “So, the next day, I went to school because I know my dad wouldn’t want me to miss my education.”
She continues to learn under a shadow of war, in a school brightened by shining stars.
She'll be OK.
3 comments:
I have a few kids whose parents or sibs are in Iraq. One of my daughter's elementary school chums in now in what he calls "the safest tech tent in Bagdhad" hacking into computer systems and directing air traffic. What stinks is how some of the "patriotic leftists" will use funerals or public receptions to air their views. It hasn't been written up much, but there have been some confrontations between families around Ft. Hood and these wackos. While I am leery of war in any form, I don't think I would be so insensitive as to express that to a family that has members overseas or who have paid the price of service. Yet there are many within the "sensitive" leftist anti-war movement that seize any chance to make their points known. It's disgusting.
While that's true, I didn't say that lefties were protesting funerals.
Yeah,but Cindy Sheehan and her traveling circus put up crosses naming casualties by name without permission of the families when she was down by Waco. When a couple of families tried to retrieve their family member's crosses they met with surprisingly violent demonstrators. I know one guy sneaked over at night and stole his son's cross. It's sad that they would use other people's sorrow for political benefit.
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