Ret. General Sanchez senate run off after home burns on Veterans Day

Fire at Home in Texas Ends Former Iraq Commander’s Run for the Senate

By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Published: December 22, 2011

Jennifer Whitney for The New York Times
Ricardo S. Sanchez, a retired Army general, in the foyer of his home this week. The house was gutted by a fire in November.

SAN ANTONIO — Ricardo S. Sanchez rummaged through a pile of charred rubble in the backyard of his home here one recent morning. He picked up a small book with ripped and stuck-together pages. It was a prayer book one of his children had given his wife. He found what appeared to be a blackened, soggy rag. Unfolding it, he realized he was holding his daughter’s baptismal dress.

Last month, on Veterans Day, his two-story brick home was devastated by a fire that engulfed the garage, his daughter’s Ford Explorer and much of the roof and attic. A retired three-star general who served in Kuwait, Kosovo and Iraq, he had seen war in the past, but not in his present, here at his home, among the carefully landscaped streets of a gated community called Inwood.
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