As US troop fatalities in Iraq pass the 3000 mark, the New York Times' Dana Canedy shares a very personal story of one of those lost: her fiancé Charles Monroe King, the father of her infant son Jordan. First Sergeant King was killed in Iraq in October, one month before his tour of duty would have ended. Before he died, King had the chance to complete a journal he'd kept for his son.
He shared the little details Jordan would have learned about his father over the years: favorite foods, favorite football team. He offered the type of wisdom fathers do: treat people with respect, treat women in particular with reverence. Sergeant King, a formally trained artist, drew pictures for his son, including an eerily prescient drawing of an angel who bears an uncanny resemblance to King himself, kneeling with bowed head, looking down through the clouds.
Canedy shares fragments of her fiancé's labor of love, but also allows us to see King as she saw him, and as Jordan would have seen his father. King was a spiritual person, a thoughtful partner, a devoted father. He took responsibility to his men seriously, even as it led him into harm's way.
Reading such stories is brutally painful and particularly if you don't support the war it is easy to simply avoid reading them, change the channel, turn the page. But Charles King's own words perfectly sum up just why such stories must be read: "Things may not always be easy or pleasant for you,
that’s life, but always pay your respects for the way people lived and
what they stood for. It’s the honorable thing to do."
