Our 2008 person of the year

As 2008 comes to a close, our Person of the Year is not named Obama or Palin. Instead, we choose to salute The Forgotton Soldier.

After six years of combat the sacrifices of the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have fallen off the front pages and no longer make the nightly news.

Yet every day more than 200,000 U.S. troops are deployed into war zones, either on the sharp end of combat operations or in the barely safer "rear areas" in support of those operations. The danger remains every bit as high as it was at the beginning of those wars, but because the casualties come in small packets of only a few soldiers at a time, it no longer demands the attention of the media or the general public.

So far, 4,217 U.S. troops have died in Iraq (as of Monday), 625 in Afghanistan, and several hundred allied casualties have pushed that total over 5,000 killed in those two wars (not to mention the enemy and civilian deaths).

Those numbers would be even higher if not for the miraculous work being done by the military medical forces, who have saved countless lives that in any other war would have been added to the list of killed in action.

Somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000 troops have suffered physical wounds (the Pentagon doesn't release those numbers) and up to one-third of the troops returning from those wars are suffering from post-traumatic stress, all casualties that have disappeared into the cracks, forgotten by all but friends and family members.

Nor do we hear much these days about the sacrifices of the families left behind, families who wait and worry for the return of their loved ones, and pray he (or she) comes home the same person who left them anywhere from four to 18 months earlier.

These brave men and women no longer get the press they deserve, they no longer stand number one in the public's conscience, but they will always be number one in our eyes.

So, as 2008 comes to a close, we salute The Forgotten Solider, knowing that the dangers they face and the sacrifices they make are no less today than they were in the heady days of the initial successes in those wars.

We refuse to let them be forgotten.

-- Kelly Everitt