Bush’s words ring hollow at memorial

I keep going to the memorials, though my head keeps telling me to stay away. It wipes me out for days. My heart tells me it is the least I can do.

So I go, take my place next to the families of the soldiers who have died, and grieve alongside them.

It astounded me the other day, sitting in the chapel at Fort Carson, how the loss of one man’s life simply rips to shreds the lives of so many other people.

I guess I always knew this. Yet it comes home like a sledgehammer when you sit among the grieving and hear their wailing ring against the chapel walls.

You think, in that time, of baseball, maybe a comedy sketch you saw on television - anything to keep your sobbing in check. And all around you, large, graying men in Army dress uniforms have lost it.

There is an anger component, too. It would not be a factor for a person, I suppose, who never picked up a newspaper, never watched the news on TV.

It had not been quite 12 hours since the president delivered his Iraq speech when I sat amid the grieving. There was a definite disconnect between the two. I felt anger sweeping through me.

The three dead men I had come to honor were men I knew in life only because I wanted to see, firsthand, if what was being said in Washington bore any resemblance to what was really happening on the mean streets and dirt roads of Iraq.

I knew the day after Christmas 2003, when our driver raced through the streets of Fallujah to get me and my photographer partner out of Iraq alive, and to our waiting airliner flight home in Amman, Jordan, that the insurgents were not on the run, as I discovered our leaders saying when I landed in Denver.

I knew all too well upon returning home in one piece from Baghdad three months ago that America - contrary to the president’s and the vice president’s proclamations - was nowhere "close to winning" in that violent country. The insurgency isn’t in its "final throes."

I have spent eight weeks over the past two years in the dust, heat and nastiness that is Iraq with American soldiers and have not once been on a patrol with - or even seen - a member of the Iraqi security forces.

The president on Tuesday declared there are more than 160,000 Iraqi security force members trained and equipped for a variety of missions.

Perhaps he is right. Perhaps I just missed them.

"As the Iraqi stand up," the president also vowed the other night, "we will stand down."

If this is the case, we are in for a very long military haul, if my own experience is an indicator. The three men I mourned at a base they will never see again died doing what I fervently believe Iraqis should have been doing: scouting out and disarming roadside bombs.

Those three men were there at all only because two other roadside bombs had gone off minutes earlier in quick succession under American Humvees and other armor.

When they arrived and spread out to secure the area, a third bomb was remotely triggered by an insurgent, blowing all three to bits.

As we speak, the surviving members of the soldiers’ platoon are in the field. In e-mail I receive, more than one of them has complained they’ve not fired their weapon even once since arriving in country.

While their brothers are dying.

It is the same story told by the familiar faces I encountered after the memorial service, men who had been sent home from Iraq with a variety of injuries.

"How are the boys doing?" they are asked cheerfully. To a man, they grimace.

They told stories of being yelled at as they walked up a road.

"Wires!"

"I’m standing almost on top of the (expletive)," one soldier recounted. "I’m here today only because the (expletives) didn’t rig it right."

They will clear a town of insurgents, they told me, and leave. The next day, more insurgents have taken their place.

They roll out of the gates of their base, they said, and pray the ground beneath them doesn’t explode.

There is no man-on-man fighting, they said. Most days they convoy out in the morning to show themselves in villages. If they make it, they move in and hand out teddy bears and candy to the locals, ask them what projects and services they most need.

And that is it.

It is why I wanted desperately for the president to outline an aggressive strategy for winning this war, to sternly prod the fledgling -Iraqi government to get on its feet, to rally the Iraqi citizenry to take ownership of their fledgling democracy by, if nothing else, turning against the insurgent bad guys.

Maybe he could have spoken of initiating talks with our NATO partners to step up their help in training the Iraqis, of maybe helping stanch the flow of foreign fighters across Iraq’s still-porous borders.

Instead, he merely spouted all-too-familiar "freedom and democracy" platitudes and Sept. 11 fear-mongering, as if the clock had been rolled back three years.

I had wanted to ask Barbara Ulbrich, the sweet, cherubic-faced mother of Brian, whose helmet, rifle, boots and dog tags hung on a platform on the altar, what she thought of the speech and her son’s role in the war on terror when she introduced herself and gave me a big hug.

Then I didn’t ask. It didn’t matter.

Words are never a match for reality.

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