Military units like the 101st Airborne are coming home from the war in Iraq, replaced through an enormous troop rotation that will take months.
The commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division returned from Iraq and uncased the division's colors, symbolically ending the unit's year at war."There were few easy days in Iraq ... all Americans can be very proud of what our soldiers accomplished," Maj. Gen. David Petraeus said Saturday after displaying a red and blue flag emblazoned with the division's screaming eagle symbol. Petraeus, 51, of Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y., flew home with 188 fellow soldiers.
"I cannot say enough about our young soldiers, they were magnificent," Petraeus said, adding that war brought "numerous episodes of hardship and sorrow."
Sixty soldiers from Fort Campbell have been killed in the war - 58 of them from the 101st, which has had more deaths in Iraq than any other U.S. military unit. "It's been a very, very tough year," Petraeus later told The Associated Press. "There's nothing harder than losing soldiers in combat. It's like losing your sons and daughters, and that takes a bit of a toll on you over time."
But he said he is optimistic about Iraq's future. "I think the potential in Iraq is incredible," he said.
Several thousand 101st soldiers have returned home since Jan. 7. The remainder of the division's 20,000-plus soldiers are expected to arrive by early March at Fort Campbell, on the Tennessee-Kentucky line 50 miles north of Nashville.
Prediction: journalists will soon descend on the returning warriors and try to dig for any comments indicating problems with the war itself and/or how it's been conducted. Normal personal grousing will then be "sexed up" into a generalized diatribe against the war, SecDef Rumsfeld, and President Bush. The personal observations won't be the problem -- we've heard lots just through the amazing Letters section in Stars and Stripes -- but the hype will be. Let us count the days.
Posted by Alan at February 15, 2004 10:56 AM