I wanted to comment briefly on Mark Benjamin’s piece about casualty announcements being a painful as ever. Mark noted that three soldiers killed on July 18th in Afghanistan were all from a Pennsylvania National Guard unit, and that one of them, Sgt Brian K. Mowery, at age 49 could easily have been a grandfather. Lots of Guard and Reserve soldiers are older than their active component counterparts. I was a 44-year-old major when I arrived in Afghanistan. Most of my peers were in their early 30s. So while a 49-year-old sergeant would be unheard of in the regular Army, it’s not even really an oddity in the Guard.
It’s important that we all take a minute, just as Mark Benjamin does regularly, to read through the casualty reports and specifically to read the names and ages and home towns of the service men and women who are killed in service to our great nation.
War is usually a young-man’s game. It’s hard and dangerous work. Sergeant Mowery’s age is relevant in that it points out that we aren’t sending young draftees to fight and die in Afghanistan. We remain an all volunteer force and so older Americans – up to age 42 – are enlisting and going off to war.