For Those Who Didn't Come Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Yesterday we celebrated my sister's birthday and a friend's birthday with a big family BBQ.\u00a0 As I looked around I realized how absolutely blessed I am\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2008\/05\/26\/for-those-who-didnt-come-home\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"For Those Who Didn't Come Home\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yesterday we celebrated my sister's birthday and a friend's birthday with a big family BBQ.\u00a0 As I looked around I realized how absolutely blessed I am\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2008\/05\/26\/for-those-who-didnt-come-home\/\" 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{"id":2539,"date":"2008-05-26T12:33:30","date_gmt":"2008-05-26T17:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/voxnova2.wordpress.com\/?p=2539"},"modified":"2008-05-26T12:33:30","modified_gmt":"2008-05-26T17:33:30","slug":"for-those-who-didnt-come-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/voxnova\/2008\/05\/26\/for-those-who-didnt-come-home\/","title":{"rendered":"For Those Who Didn’t Come Home"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When you have a loved one in a war zone, you don\u2019t focus on ethics or morality of war.\u00a0 You cannot.\u00a0 All you know is that you have a loved one in danger and your heart is sick.<\/p>\n

When my brother Jake went in on his first tour into Iraq, NBC had an embedded reporter with his unit so that every night on the news hour his family could watch him get shot at.\u00a0 It literally made me sick to my stomach.\u00a0 This wasn\u2019t drama.\u00a0 This was real and real people would die; both Americans AND Iraqis.\u00a0 When my brother John came home he had a video of what went down in the Battle of Fallujah.\u00a0 It was unedited, real deal, this is not Hollywood.\u00a0 And it made me deeply sad.\u00a0 I saw both Iraqis and Americans dying on the streets and all I could do was pray for their families as they grieved their losses.<\/p>\n

So last night, as we all gathered around and sang, I thought of the men in my both brother\u2019s units who did not get to come home and celebrate ever again.\u00a0 I thought about Medic Fralish<\/a>, who will always be memorialized on my brother\u2019s shoulder in the form of a huge tattoo.\u00a0 Fralish worked hard and succeeded in a saving a little Afghani girl\u2019s life.\u00a0 I thought about PFC Bertalino.\u00a0 I thought about my brother\u2019s drill instructor at the age of 26 who will never get to see his daughter grow up.<\/p>\n

It is terrible that it is so easy for our country to send people to their deaths with no sacrifice from us required.\u00a0 The least we can do is bow our heads and pray for the dead today.\u00a0 And pray for our elected officials to use wisdom so that more people do not have to mourn.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"