February 24^th was a good day for me. My sister Diana and her husband and her two boys and her two girls all gathered around their speakerphone and sang Happy Birthday to me. My mom gave me a Jeff Jarvis book with a nice inscription. My wife, who is beautiful and always cheerful, gave me a Beretta. The temperature reached an unseasonable 50.

Two Illinois Army National Guard soldiers died in Afghanistan on my birthday. Two months earlier, one of them had written the following letter home:

Wednesday, December 31, 2008 at 9:30am

A strange thing…

When I think about what surrounds me, the institutional corruption, the random violence, the fear and desperation, I feel the reasons why I am here more and more sharply. As we grow in our soldier skills, surviving by finding the hidden dangers, seeing the secret motives and the shifting politics…we grow a set of skills that is unique and powerful in this situation.

We also see what you cannot see in the States, you are surrounded by the love of Christ and faith in freedom and humanity, like a fish you think water is 'a puff of air' because it is always there, you do not notice it…we who are out of the water look back and see the world we love surrounded by enemies, poison and envy that wants to fall on you like a storm of ruin.

We who joined with vague notions of protecting our country see how desperate the peril, how hungry the enemy and how frail the security we have is. So the more I love you all the more I feel I must keep fighting for you. The more I love and long for home the more right I feel here on the front line standing between you and the seething madness that wants to suck the life and love out of our land.

Does that mean I cannot go home? I hope not, because I want this just to be the postponement of the joy of life, not the sacrifice of mine. If it costs me my life to protect our land and people then that is a small thing, I just hope that fate lets me return to the promised land and remind people just how great our land is.

War is a young mans game, and I am getting an old mans head…it is a strange thing. I just hope that I am not changed so that I cannot take joy in the land inside the wire when I make it home. I want to be with you all again and let my gun sit in the rack and float on my back in a tube down a lazy river…

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