Soldier Sacrifices (editorial)

Try this.

SOLDIER SACRIFICES
The Edmonton Sun 2006.07.26 Editorial/Opinion

The deaths of Cpl. Francisco Gomez, a 44-year-old member of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Edmonton, and Quebec City native Cpl. Jason Patrick Warren, 29, of the Black Watch, the Royal Highland Regiment of Canada, in a suicide bombing last weekend in Afghanistan brings the death toll for the dangerous mission to 20: 19 soldiers and one diplomat.
If those numbers make you uncomfortable, good. We hope they do.
Because if people are uneasy with those statistics it means they still care, one way or another. It means they're either gutted by the fact that our soldiers have to pay such a high price in order to try to bring stability to a war torn region as part of the war on terror, or they're outraged at how our soldiers' lives are being sacrificed for a futile cause.
As our readers know, we completely support the Armed Forces' mission in Afghanistan. And it grieves us whenever we at the Sun get the notification that another soldier has died, because we know all too well by now that these aren't automatons programmed to go into the Afghanistan mountains to kill. They're flesh and blood human beings with families back here in Canada - spouses, parents, children - who are suffering the worst kind of grief imaginable.
And with every death, the tentacles of pain, sorrow and despair spread further across the military family and the greater Edmonton community, which has embraced our soldiers with open arms.
We know that not all Canadians share our view of this mission. That's the democratic right we enjoy in this country - to disagree with public policy without fear of reprisals, official or otherwise. And we know that according to some recent polls, Canadians are growing increasingly uneasy about the Afghanistan mission. One poll last week found that 41% of Canadians surveyed believe Canadian troops should be pulled from Afghanistan immediately, while only 34% say they should remain for a limited time of at least two years.
But that's OK. Because it means people are still engaged. They're following what's happening to our soldiers. And they're naturally concerned.
We've gone through that extended period when Canadians were utterly indifferent to our soldiers. We lived through the time not that long ago when the ones who died in so-called peacekeeping duty overseas had their deaths relegated to the back pages of newspapers from coast to coast, if they were even reported at all.
We don't ever want to go back to those days. We don't want Canadians to be
apathetic about our soldiers and the lives that they put on the line in the
blazing Afghan sun - or anywhere else - every single day.
We don't want people to look at a picture of a dead soldier in the paper and
shrug it off as another one.