Links Through Time - Memorials

Because of the hot weather outside this afternoon, I was surfing in doors and happened onto the Los Angeles Times Website that 
remembers each Californian who has died in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I was Googling to see if a friend of mine who died in the summer of 1971 and was buried in the Visalia Cemetery was recorded online, and came on this July 15, 2006 entry. When I saw the name and the face of the father my heart sank - the father was a year ahead of me in high school, I think we played sports together - the son was 21.

After reading the obituary, I went back to the Times' site California's War Dead, and clicked two entries to the left (the next day, July 16, 2006), and came on a soldier who had gone to Corvallis High School - in the town where we consider home in Oregon. I remember reading about him and having this same feeling now as when I read about earlier casualties from Oregon when we lived there.

Then two more clicks to the left, and a Marine from Clovis. I sensed I knew of this casualty, too - July 29, 2006. When I read his obituary, it was mentioned that the funeral service had to be held in a larger church than his own, New Hope - that was a church we attended in the early 1980's when we lived in Clovis. The Marine was the third casualty from his high school's class of 2001 (1). The reason I thought I knew about him was I had read in the Annapolis Capital newspaper a couple of years ago that two brothers from Clovis had been killed in the wars - both were from that same church. As it turned out, the two were different from the Clovis Marine I saw above - still, the two were brothers (November 4, 2004 & August 22, 2007), and that is now seven from the same high school, and three from the same church. A third brother who enlisted with the second brother after their other brother was killed, witnessed the crash of the Blackhawk helicopter that took his brother's and 13 others' lives. Like a Private Ryan, he had to leave service as the sole survivor.

I checked a few more dates in both directions of the sites I list above, but the names were not familiar - only the names of the California cities they were from. That made sense, I wouldn't have thought that a random hit on a Website I wasn't looking for would also be within a couple more clicks - no more than a couple of degrees of separation - from people I may know, or others I could know who live with heart aches that must be so very deep.

I think I have done enough surfing the Web for today.

A search engine that shows all of the fallen in the two wars can be found clicking here.
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(1) More recent report of the casualties in Clovis found by clicking here.