Remember those four soldiers kidnapped and executed by terrorists in Iraq last month? The Washington post has an article about one of them, Capt. Brian S. Freeman, and the effort he spent his last hours working on -- getting an 11-year-old Irqi boy to the United States for lifesaving heart surgery.

Hours before getting killed the way he feared most, Capt. Brian S. Freeman looked up and smiled when Abu Ali dropped by his office.

After nearly six months of overcoming financial and bureaucratic hurdles in a war zone, Freeman told the Iraqi man, there were promising signs that a pair of U.S. visas -- the last big step in getting Abu Ali's 11-year-old son to the United States for lifesaving heart surgery -- would be issued soon.

The Iraqi was speechless. He asked an interpreter to express his gratitude to the tall American soldier who had made saving the child's life an unofficial mission. Then he pulled out his camera, swung his arm around Freeman's broad shoulders and posed for three photographs.

Hours later, shortly before sunset Jan. 20, armed men in GMC trucks stormed into the government building in Karbala, in southern Iraq. They killed an American soldier, handcuffed Freeman and three other U.S. soldiers, hauled them into the vehicles and drove off. Freeman and the other abducted soldiers were later slain by the attackers.

There are those in this country who believe our soldiers are the moral equivalent of SS stormtroopers, terrorizing the people of Iraq. They claim that our soldiers are intellectually deficient and lacking in opportunities in life, so they are stuck in Iraq because the military was their only option. And there are those who believe that Iraqis don't want or support US troops present in their country. I hope they read this article, and recognize how wrong they are about those things -- and about the terrorists they argue are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.

American soldiers struggle to bring life and peace to Iraq -- the terrorists bring only death, chaos, and a return to the bad old days of Baathist rule, or worse.

Posted by: Greg at 11:07 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 364 words, total size 2 kb.