Paying the Price, Part II

Estimates of the number of Iraqis killed since the invasion range as high as 100,000, most of them innocent civilians, many of them children. Though on an admittedly smaller scale, families here are also suffering for Bush's war: in addition to the parents, siblings, and spouses of the troops killed, 900 U.S. children so far have lost parents in Iraq.



Sad to the depths of his 4-year-old soul, Jack Shanaberger knew what he didn't want to be when he grows up: a father.



"I don't want to be a daddy because daddies die," the child solemnly told his mother after his father, Staff Sgt. Wentz "Baron" Shanaberger, a military policeman from Fort Pierce, Fla., was killed March 23 in an ambush in Iraq.







More than 40 U.S. troops have died without ever seeing their children, including Army 1st Lt. Doyle Hufstedler, whose daughter, Grace Ashley, was born six weeks after his death.







I wonder what these mothers will tell their children as they're growing up. I couldn't blame any mother who felt the need to heroize her husband and what he was doing, because she can't bear the thought of her child believing his father died in an unjust cause. But I pray they'll have the strength to someday tell their children the truth about why their fathers were in Iraq, and about the government that sent them there.