His senior year at Indian River High School in Frankford, Del., Russell White was the starting nose guard for the Indians' football team, despite weighing only 165 pounds.
"That's pretty light for a nose guard, but he was just so quick," [former football coach Jimmy] Bunting said. "He was an athlete that gave everything he could."
That same year, 2001, Russell White decided what he would do after graduation. He would join the Marines:
"He wanted to get bin Laden," White's father, Gregg, 48, said Monday. …
Just hours after he telephoned his parents Sunday to wish his dad a happy Father's Day, White, 19, was killed in Afghanistan when he was shot by another Marine cleaning his pistol while on base.
The weapon accidentally fired, hitting the Dagsboro teen in the head. He died at a military hospital. …
White, a lance corporal, had been in Afghanistan for about a month and was part of the mission to root out bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida, his family said. He was assigned to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
As of Monday, 89 soldiers taking part in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan have been killed, 37 of them in nonhostile situations, according to Pentagon figures.
Russell White was young, brave, patriotic and high-spirited. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to serve his country and "to get bin Laden" — to bring to justice the people who orchestrated those attacks, or to bring justice to them, as his president said.
Thousands of other young Americans responded like White did, but they were not sent to Afghanistan "to root out bin Laden and other members of al-Qaida." Instead, they were sent to Iraq to destroy the threat of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction because Saddam Hussein collaborated with al-Qaida to overthrow a dictator and build a newly democratic nation.
From the reports I've read of interviews and surveys of American troops serving in Iraq, many there believe their service there has something to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, even though — like the commander in chief who sent them there — they are unable to explain how, exactly, this second war is related to the first. As of today, 846 of them have died in this collateral war.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is said to have counseled the first President Bush before the first Persian Gulf War with this comment attributed to Napoleon: "If you're going to take Vienna, take Vienna."
The second President Bush, long before he had finished "taking Vienna" in Afghanistan, decided he would try, simultaneously, to take Vienna in Baghdad (or, to use an apter Napoleonic reference, to take Moscow in winter in Baghdad). One result of trying to wage two, unrelated wars simultaneously has been that neither has received the full attention or commitment that it required and thus neither has gone well.
Russell White was wholly committed to his cause. His commander in chief never was.
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