WP: Military Families Mourn Daughters

20 Female Service Members Have Been Killed in Iraq

Wednesday, May 26, 2004; Page A01

EL PASO -- When Sgt. Isela Rubalcava's body arrived at the airport from Iraq, her mother wailed like a child. "I don't want to see her like this," Maria Isela Rubalcava cried out in Spanish, a priest at the scene said. "Why, Isela, why? Get up, get up! Let's go home."

By the time a funeral Mass was celebrated last week at St. Patrick's Church in nearby Canutillo, the Rev. Manny Marrufo said, Maria Rubalcava had accepted the reality that her daughter was gone, dead of shrapnel wounds she suffered when a mortar round exploded during an attack in Mosul on May 8. It was three days before her 26th birthday.

Rubalcava was one of 20 female U.S. service members to die in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- the highest number of U.S. military women to die in a combat operation since World War II, military historians said. The dead include Pfc. Lori Piestewa, 23, who was killed in an ambush in the first days of the invasion, and Pfc. Leslie D. Jackson, 18, of Richmond, who was killed Thursday when her vehicle hit an improvised explosive device. Others died in helicopter crashes, or vehicle accidents, or when guns accidentally went off, or while trying to defuse bombs.

(snip)

For decades, Defense Department regulations kept military women away from direct action, out of fear that the American public would echo the cries of Maria Isela Rubalcava -- "I don't want to see her like this" -- when it came to women dying in combat. But when those rules changed in the mid-1990s, few people complained. And now, with more women serving in what the military calls "at-risk" jobs in Iraq, and more of them becoming casualties, the public has largely remained silent.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55704-2004May25.html

I simply cannot imagine what I'd do. And I am all against open caskets.

And my heart is breaking for every family who has lost children on both sides of this bullshit war.

neither safe from this insane war, nor the ones to come.

i'll take them to Spain first.
dp

I love the media's 'who me?' act when it comes to this kind of thing. :(