Peter Fulham, Columnist
Ideology: Democrat | Writing From: College of the Holy Cross (MA)

Ralph Anthony Webb Frietas was killed in Iraq last week. A sergeant and a native of Detroit, he was 23. In the last week of November, three American soldiers died in the Iraq War. Briand T. Williams, of Sparks, Georgia, was among them. He died of gunshot wounds after insurgents attacked his unit in Numaniyah. He was 25.

These fatalities remind us that tragic loss of life in Iraq and Afghanistan continues as the nation enters the holidays. And once again, the profound contrast between the horror of our troops’ deployment and the serenity of the home front presents us with a familiar experience. The modest joys of Christmas compel us to turn our thoughts to those who cannot share them and to the pain of war.

I’ve always thought it was telling that certain Christmas songs never seem to expire. Has there ever been a year when we have not heard Bing Crosby bellowing over the radio to American troops in a 1943 rendition of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”? The holidays help us to seek out nostalgia for a moment in American history when the sadness of a soldier’s absence was tempered by a qualified, collective optimism – a lonely guarantee: “I’ll be home for Christmas / If only in my dreams.”

During this time of the year, it’s safe to say that many of us try, at least, to find temporary relief from our typical concerns. But it is precisely the near-perfect joy of a family Christmas that compels many Americans to contemplate the unknowable Christmas of a soldier.

Last week, as I sat down in a political science class, I overheard one student remark to a friend, “We’re celebrating Christmas early this year.” The friend turned and asked why. “Because my brother’s going back to Iraq,” the girl responded.

Bob Herbert, The New York Times columnist, once quoted the mother of a nineteen-year-old soldier who was killed in 2004 by a bomb in Kirkuk. “I opened the door and I seen the man in the dress greens and I knew. I immediately knew,” she said. “But I thought that if, as long as I didn’t let him in, he couldn’t tell me. And then it – none of that would’ve happened. So he kept saying, ‘Ma’am, I need to come in.’ And I kept telling him, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t come in.’”

It is easy, perhaps, to sit in an apartment on a high floor on the Upper West Side or in a house in the Boston suburbs and look at the numbers of our two wars with a level head. At the time I am writing this, 4,689 Americans have died in the Iraq War. 1,538 have died in Afghanistan. According to some conservative estimates, over 100,000 Iraqi civilians have died in the conflict so far. But it is awesome to extrapolate, from the pain of one mother, the sum of the sacrifices our two wars have truly required.

Until very recently, I had always subscribed to the eloquent advice E.B. White once offered to readers of a Christmas edition of The New Yorker – that “remembrance is sufficient of the beauty we have seen.”

But no remembrance, no matter how lucid, can bring back a fallen soldier. So this Christmas, we do the only thing we can: offer thanks for the sacrifice of American servicemen and hold close the memory of the many lives cut short, so quietly and suddenly, in order for us to continue on at home in peace.