Army unit working to get blind Iraqi girl eye treatment

“We’ve taken a real vested interest in the people here,” Kendrick said. “We empathize with the people.

Army unit working to get blind Iraqi girl eye treatment
Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Soldiers from the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment are working to help a young girl in Iraq go beyond having a mental picture of her father to actually seeing him with her eyes.

Noor Taha Najee has been blind since birth, the result of a condition caused by poorly developed corneas. Though the condition can be corrected with surgery, the procedure isn’t available to the family, which lives near Kalsu, south of Baghdad.

The soldiers are working with a nongovernmental organization in Los Angeles to have the surgery done. “We’re on standby now, waiting for a doctor in L.A.,” said 1st Lt. Michael Kendrick, platoon leader of 2nd Platoon, Company D.
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http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=53760
Climbing up on my soapbox to get a better view. There are always these very heart warming stories of what some of the men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan are trying to do. We see so much of the horrifying images of the wounds they suffer from yet very little of what they have to go through. We see how human these warriors are in stories like this.

They want to help. They didn't go there to kill Iraqis. They were told they were going there to free them from Saddam and find the WMD they were told were meant for us back here at home. That's what they cared about. Ever since the day Iraq was taken, they have been serving and dying and so have the people of Iraq. We still don't know why that was. Still the notion of going in for a good cause is what they had in mind. They still want to hang onto that. They still want to do some good there but they have nothing to do the good with. They can do great and wonderful things here and there, they can try to rebuild what gets blown up and they can try to make peace in a nation that every expert knew would fall apart the way it did. We can argue all we want about what supporting them really means but you would have to be a fool to believe they had any evil intent going there.

We need to see them as humans, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, as much as possible if we are ever going to understand them when they come home and suffer wounds for their service. I get about as angry as anyone about all of this but it gets me even more upset to know when they come home wounded, there isn't enough room for all of them to be taken care of. I see them as humans, courageous humans born with the tendency to be heroic already in them. I see them as noble but within that they are still humans asked to do the abnormal. We send them into this kind of life altering experiences and then we are the first ones to complain when they come home changed by them instead of being ready to take care of them. What the hell is wrong with us? We still don't get it. I still haven't heard of any huge mail drop onto the steps of congress demanding we take care of them. I have yet to read a flood of editorials or special report followed by special report on how we don't. Aren't they worth it?