For years, U.S. troops — particularly veterans of America's long and costly war in Iraq — have learned the uniquely modern military skill of separating their own pride in service from their personal views about the broader "success" of the military campaign in which they're asked to fight.
Rightly so, as the long-term impact of U.S. military operations and the positive impact on American interests is difficult to discern through the smoke, haze and myopic vantage point of the battlefield.
Nevertheless, the Iraqi army's defeat in Ramadi last week surely came as gut-wrenching news for many of the troops and veterans who fought there during the eight-year Iraq War that officially ended in 2011.
Those troops, mostly Marines, saw some of the most harrowing combat action in modern American military history. They lived behind concrete blast walls at Camp Blue Diamond, manned rooftop outposts with heavy machine guns 24 hours a day and grew accustomed to daily mortar fire. Even "inside the wire," daily routine often involved donning body armor just to walk across the courtyard to use the toilet.
For a time, Ramadi was widely considered the most dangerous place in Iraq, if not the world. At least 70 U.S. troops lost their lives during the time dubbed the "Battle of Ramadi" that ran from roughly April through November of 2006. Hundreds of others died in the city and its surrounding environs during other periods of the war.
In all, more than 1,000 Americans died in combat in Anbar province, where Ramadi is situated.
A decade later, their family members still think of those young men and women every day — even as they struggle to make some kind of sense of the new images depicting the Islamic State's black flags rippling over Ramadi's rooftops.
It's tough to blame the beleaguered Iraqi troops who fled the Islamic State advance and abandoned their last posts in the city on May 17. That embattled troupe of
jundis
had been deployed there for a year, with no relief in sight. They had not been paid in months. They were ill-equipped and — due to a tangled web of political factors that only native Iraqis can truly understand — they were not getting properly resupplied by their higher command echelons in Baghdad.
It's easy, however, to understand the perspective of the families of American service members who made the ultimate sacrifice in Ramadi, both in 2006 and over the course of the war, in their swift excoriation of senior American officials who seek to downplay the significance of the Islamic State's victory there.
To wit: As the fall of the city appeared imminent, the U.S. military's top officer, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, suggested that Ramadi was "not symbolic in any way" and not "central to the future of Iraq."
That lit a firestorm among Ramadi veterans and family members. Their anger and dismay were captured in an open letter to Dempsey from Debbie Lee, mother of Navy Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class (SEAL) Marc A. Lee, killed during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi while clearing a house about a mile from his combat outpost in one of the ugliest sections of the city.
Debbie Lee's words flew like hot tracer rounds:
"His blood is still in that soil and forever will be. My son and many others gave their future in Ramadi. Ramadi mattered to them."
Andrew Tilghman is the executive editor for Military Times. He is a former Military Times Pentagon reporter and served as a Middle East correspondent for the Stars and Stripes. Before covering the military, he worked as a reporter for the Houston Chronicle in Texas, the Albany Times Union in New York and The Associated Press in Milwaukee.
