It was a quiet holiday here in my Southeast Alaska home. The landscape wasn’t white, the inside wasn’t decorated, and my children were elsewhere. My oldest son, Michael, was in Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, thousands of miles and dozens of hours away from Iraq, where he spent Christmas two years ago and may return to spend the next one.
"The neck of the cavalry-man, with the bullet through and through, I examine; Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard; (Come, sweet death! be persuaded, O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.)"
A few days after the wedding I called up the Sandberg house in Chattanooga, Tennessee and spent a couple of hours talking to Uncle Sandy and my Aunt Jessie about his time in the war.
