Parents of slain soldier 'don't feel he died in vain'
By ORLAN LOVE
CASCADE — The parents of fallen soldier Michael Ristau said Friday that freedom is not free and they accept the cost.
“We don’t feel he died in vain. We have it very good here because of people like him,” the soldier’s father, Randy Ristau, said during a news conference at City Hall.
It helps knowing “he died doing something he loved very much,” his mother, Suzanne Ristau, said.
Army Sgt. Ristau, 25, was killed July 13 in Afghanistan’s Qalat Zabul province when a roadside bomb impacted the vehicle in which he was riding, the Department of Defense said.
Suzanne Ristau said her family had been notified that two other soldiers were injured in the blast, one seriously.
She said her son got to spend only two weeks with his infant son, Hyle, before deploying in late December to Afghanistan with his unit, Company B, 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team.
Ristau, who joined the Army in July 2004, shortly after he graduated from Lincoln’s Challenge Academy in Rantoul, Ill., had served with the same unit in Iraq in 2006 and 2007.
The family is putting together a video with photographs of Michael Ristau to help his young son understand more about his father, she said. He is also survived by his wife Elizabeth of Tacoma, Wash., and another son, Bradley, 5, from an earlier marriage.
The Ristaus, who traveled to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware for the solemn and dignified transfer of their son’s remains, said they were grateful for the outpouring of support from family, friends, neighbors and total strangers.
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Eisenhower was the president when troops died in Vietnam in 1959. They kept dying with Kennedy as president. They died under Johnson, Nixon and Ford. People tend to forget the Vietnam Wall begins with the date 1959 and ends with 1975.
Some enlisted, some were drafted but every single one of them were not risking their lives for the president at the time, for the reason, for the money, or for any other reason than for each other.
With Afghanistan and Iraq, just as with the Gulf War, they were serving this country but in the end, they were willing to die for the soldier next to them. So if you want to say they died in vain or their lives were wasted, maybe you should go and talk to the guy they saved and made it back home.
