Fw: Thought for Wednesday, Feb 5, 2003
timothy taylor
Tim "The Tool Man" Taylor
----- Original Message -----
From: "galvin" <galvin@DELETE_TO_REPLYunix.tamu.edu>
To: <TFT...@TAMU.EDU>
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 3:15 AM
Subject: Thought for Wednesday, Feb 5, 2003
> LAST THURSDAY, on a high Afghan plain seven miles east of Bagram air
> base, a Blackhawk helicopter went down, killing the entire crew. The four
> U.S. soldiers who died in the accident, like the seven astronauts who
> perished Saturday, were volunteers, taking on risks they understood well
> in service of their country. Beyond their units and their families, their
> deaths attracted little notice -- a paragraph or two in some newspapers,
> not even that in others.
>
> The tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia grips the nation as do few
> other catastrophes, and for good reasons. Even this many decades into
> space exploration, the astronauts embrace dangers that the rest of us can
> only imagine -- but that many of us do imagine, and even dream of. As they
> fling themselves into orbit and float in the void while trying to tell us
> what they see and feel, men and women like David M. Brown and Kalpana
> Chawla and the others who died Saturday become more than role models of
> discipline and courage and good cheer in cramped circumstances. They come
> to embody national aspirations of greatness, and human aspirations to
> reach beyond ourselves.
>
> Yet as we read the biographies of these brave seven, replay their buoyant
> interviews of recent days and come to know the grief-stricken but proud
> surviving spouses and parents, we might spare a moment also for the four
> who died near Bagram, and the others most of us will never hear about. As
> their remains were transported to Germany for autopsies on the way home,
> the victims were identified as Chief Warrant Officer Mark S. O'Steen, 43,
> of Alabama; Chief Warrant Officer Thomas J. Gibbons, 31, of
> Tennessee; Sgt. Gregory M. Frampton, 37, of California; and Staff
> Sgt. Daniel L. Kisling Jr., 31, of Missouri. They joined 18 other service
> members who have died in accidents in the Afghanistan campaign and 25
> killed by hostile fire -- a total of 47 deaths since the fall of
> 2001. Thousands risk their lives every day in that distant country and in
> the skies over Iraq, and thousands more may soon be asked to do so. With
> so many reserves being pressed into service and scheduled retirements from
> the military being delayed, the term "volunteer" is stretched and
> tested. But these are all people who know, or who knew, they might face
> danger. These casualties, too, leave empty spaces in the lives of loved
> ones.
>
> The prayers of a nation were offered yesterday in memory of seven
> astronauts and their families, and rightly so. They gave everything in
> service to the nation, as did the Bagram four and so many more.
>
> -Washington Post
> 2003/01/03
>
==== Please DELETE This Line and Everything Below It When Replying! ===
malta.fan.trekwho: Star Trek and Doctor Who
Gated to the TREKWHO-L mailing list
FAQ and Charter: http://www.cis.um.edu.mt/staff/cmeli/lists/trekwho.html
==== This message is appended automatically by moderator software ===
==== This does not imply that the article is on topic or correct ===
--
-