Posted on: Sunday, March 20, 2005

EDITORIAL
Two years old, war's cost is coming home

It seems so long ago. Nov. 1, on The Advertiser's Aloha Troops page, was a photo of a smiling Ladda "Tammy" Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in Iraq, sent in by her parents.

Of the McKinley High School and UH grad they wrote: "We are very proud of Tammy and pray for her daily, so long as she is involved in combat actions."

Less than three weeks later, Tammy Duckworth woke up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., missing almost all of her right leg up to her hipbone, her left leg was gone below the knee and her right arm had to be held together with titanium plates and screws, as detailed in a moving story in Thursday's paper.

Duckworth's helicopter had been shot down.

Bravely and articulately, Duckworth, now promoted to major, testified last week before Congress, not about her daunting personal challenges, but about the ability of the Department of Veterans Affairs to care for the 11,285 American troops wounded in Iraq.

Many of these injuries, of course, are life-changing and disabling, requiring caring treatment and extensive rehabilitation.

Tammy Duckworth has not soured on her country's mission in Iraq. She wants to recover and fly her Blackhawk helicopter again.

But Duckworth's appearance before Congress is testimony not just to her courage and determination, but in a broader sense to a growing realization of the true cost to this nation of the war in Iraq, which was two years old yesterday.

Many of us are numbed by the steady tatoo of bombings and ambushes, the daily deaths and dreadful injuries to GIs, their Iraqi allies and civilians. The death toll among American troops has passed 1,500 as the cost nears $300 billion.

But it will be the increasing number of maimed demobilized troops, struggling to find a new place among us in wheelchairs and on artificial limbs, that will bring home to us the true price of using military force as an instrument of foreign policy.

We learn yet again that there's no such thing as a quick and dirty war.