U.S. bomb techs honor their dead; 2006 worst year since '45

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U.S. bomb techs honor their dead; 2006 worst year since '45

By MELISSA NELSON
Associated Press Writer

The abandoned truck-mounted rocket launcher didn't belong on a road approaching sprawling Camp Liberty in Iraq.

Sgt. Timothy Weiner, Airman Elizabeth Loncki and Airman Daniel Miller Jr. - a three-member bomb disposal unit known as "Team Lima" - responded.

The trio first sent a robot to inspect the truck. Then Weiner, the team leader and a career bomb technician, donned protective gear and took what technicians call "the lonely walk," the first approach to a suspected explosive. He returned.

The three then walked toward the truck without protective gear - and it exploded.

In an instant last Jan. 7, Team Lima was gone.

Weiner, a 35-year-old father who wrote of his concern for Iraqi children.

Loncki, 23 and engaged, but always a daddy's girl.

Miller, 24, a handsome daredevil who got in trouble for playing with fireworks as child.

Back in Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New York and Utah, families had been in touch with Team Lima over Christmas and had been weeks from welcoming their loved ones home from a six-month deployment. They planned funerals instead.

The families gathered again Saturday, this time in the Florida Panhandle. Team Lima's names, along with 11 others, were to be added during an annual memorial honoring military bomb technicians killed in action since 1942. The Navy's Kauffman Explosives Ordnance Disposal Training Complex on Eglin Air Force Base trains bomb technicians from all branches of the military...

 

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Military faces growing ranks of bereaved

Ursula Pirtle, left, talks with her daughter, Katie, in the play room at
a help center for families of fallen soldiers located at Fort Hood, Texas,
Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007. Pirtle's husband, Heath, was killed serving with
the Army in Iraq. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

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Military faces growing ranks of bereaved

By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer
Sat Mar 3, 12:31 PM ET

FORT HOOD, Texas - One of the first sights greeting visitors to Fort Hood is a day-care center's playground, brightly colored evidence of the Army's commitment to be family friendly.

A few blocks away is a more poignant symbol: an office building recently converted into a first-of-its-kind support center for women and children whose husbands and fathers have died in Iraq and Afghanistan. From Fort Hood alone, the toll has passed 365.

"It's our sanctuary," said Ursula Pirtle, whose daughter frequents a playroom at the center. Three-year-old Katie never met her father, Heath. He was killed in Iraq in 2003.

Over the past 15 years, America's armed forces have taken huge strides to retain married service members — improving schools, health programs and child care. But now, as never before in this family-embracing era, the military is struggling with the toughest home-front problem of all: Doing right by the often outspoken and ever-growing ranks of the bereaved.

Of the 3,350 Americans who died in Iraq and Afghanistan through early January, 1,586 of them — 47.3 percent — were married. Those fallen warriors left behind 1,954 children, according to the Pentagon's Manpower Data Center. More recent deaths have pushed that figure past 2,000.

Compared to the heavily draftee combat troops of the Vietnam war, today's volunteer fighting force is older, more reliant on National Guard and Reserve citizen-soldiers, and more likely to be married.

And more so than their Vietnam counterparts, the new generation of bereaved spouses has been vocal — on their bases, at congressional hearings — in pressing for more compassionate, effective support.

It's a constituency that politicians and generals do not want to alienate. The result has been numerous policy changes, ranging from improved benefits to better training for the officers who break the grim news of war-zone deaths. Even the Fort Hood support center materialized due to pressure from widows and their allies...

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