"...don't forget me."

W. Thomas Smith:

...

Kyle’s final call was received on July 18, 2003. He said he missed home, he wanted to come home, and “we’re making strides.” Then out of the blue – before Kyle and Regina were inadvertently cut off by the loss of the satellite signal – Kyle said, “Mom, don’t forget me.”

Regina, says she almost came unglued. “What do you mean don’t forget you?!” she said. But the signal was gone. She took a deep breath, and went on with her life.

Then came that terrible day.

“I had this ritual when the war started,” Regina says. “I would go into the cafeteria at work and get coffee and a copy of USA Today. I’d get there at 6:30 am, so I could read the paper.”

On August 7, Regina picked up a paper and read where two soldiers from the 82nd had been killed in action. The name of one of the soldiers was published. The other, pending notification of the family, had not been released.

Unnerved by the unknown death from Kyle’s unit, Regina recalls telling her co-workers how “scary it is” to read that.

The following morning was much worse. Regina was again at work when she received a call from Robert.

“He said, ‘I’m coming to get you. Pick up your purse, and I’ll meet you downstairs,’” she recalls.

“‘Why?’ I said.”

“‘I’ll tell you when I get there.’”

“‘No! I’m not moving until you tell me!’”

Robert then told her there was an Army officer who needed to speak to them together.

“I knew. I just dropped the phone and ran into one of my bosses’ offices and locked the door. I wanted to believe that if I never went outside again, it wouldn’t be true.”

But it was true. Kyle had been killed during an attack in Baghdad.

...

Yet, America – as the saying goes – “is not at war. America is at the mall.”

But America is at war. Americans in uniform and their families are sacrificing for the greater good of this nation and the world everyday.

...
The story is from a book, Faces of Freedom, that Smith and Rebecca Pepin, an evening news-anchor with Bristol, Virginia's FOX News affiliate wrote about "... the lives of men and women from all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico, who have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11."

Proceeds of the book are going to Fisher House and The Wounded Warrior Project.

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