My thoughts this weekend will be with Army SGT Mike Mitchell, one of my best friends from third grade all the way through high school. I learned of his death at the hands of an Iraqi sniper in Sadr City on 04APR04, the day I graduated from boot camp. He was the best of us then, and his legacy lives on.
Pickle
"Our Loss"
He came when he was called,
He asked for little and received less.
He fought for honor and truth,
In a world in which there was precious little.
We have been made better for his sacrifice
And yet we are poorer by his passing.
Ultimately in spite of his lost life,
We must recognize that the greatest loss lies with us;
We all have been stripped of his life and his gifts.
Of all the children he will never father,
of the students he will never tutor,
of the truth he will never uncover,
of the dreams he had that we will ever know,
of the best of humanity that he can never again be.
We cannot remember him as well as we should,
We will never remember him as well as we do now.
Alas, we barely knew him at all.
But he died in our stead,
And if there is one thing we should know,
one thing we must take from this desolate moment;
it is that he could have been us,
and he must be us.
We must live for him.
We must try to achieve the promise that was embodied his life,
before he were so nobly cast aside for our sake.
This is the only way
we can shoulder this otherwise unbearable debt.
By his selfless sacrifice he has shown
that this is how he would have had it,
had he by some accident of fate
been left as the living and not we.
By Irvine Bruce"
