The end of an old year and the coming of a new one is an appropriate time for reflection. As 2006 comes to a close, here are some of mine – in no particular order.

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This Christmas season, with so many of our fighting men and women serving overseas in harm’s way, let us stop and contemplate what it really means to be away from home at this special time of year – and to give thanks for our blessings. Home and hearth may convey the traditional and rather idyllic image of families gathered together to celebrate a joyous holiday season, but the reality is that for thousands of American servicemen and women there will be nothing joyous about Christmas 2006. Most are serving in Iraq, on the mean streets of Baghdad and Mosul, and Tall Afar, in Anbar Province and dozens of other forgettable places.

Iraq and Afghanistan are now two of the world’s most hostile places, where the harsh conditions play second fiddle only to the threat of the sudden ambush utilizing the newest weapons of war in the 21st century, the IED and the suicide bomber.

With the daily rash of news emanating from Iraq it is all too easy to overlook Afghanistan, an untamed land where even trees refuse to grow, a place ruled for centuries by warlords answerable to no one. There, another nearly forgotten but nevertheless deadly war is taking place. A multinational military force faces the daunting mission of protecting the innocent and of hunting down terrorists in a land so barren and unforgiving that no outside nation has ever truly conquered it. The British were never more than unwelcome interlopers in this remote corner of their one-time Empire, and the Russians paid a terrible price in blood for their years of occupation, ultimately withdrawing their forces in defeat and humiliation.

Wars are rarely fought in convenient places or under ideal conditions, whether on the rocky slopes of the Gallipoli peninsula or the primitive trenches of the Western Front during World War I, or the dreadful conditions of the island jungle war in the Pacific during World War II. Or the hellish conditions of the truly forgotten war in Italy where the terrain and winter weather were so severe that the best-known general was not a real person; it was “General Mud,” a place where names like the Rapido, Anzio and Monte Cassino are remembered as monuments to futility. Or of the winter of 1944-45 that was notable for the extreme cold conditions fit for neither man nor beast, perhaps the worst Europe experienced in a half-century. The Battle of the Bulge was as much about the weather as it was about resisting Hitler’s last-ditch German offensive. Not long after the last guns of World War II were silent the Korean War set new standards for fighting in conditions where the freezing winters were as deadly as the enemy. Christmas in Korea was celebrated not with good will but behind a rifle or machine-gun. Finally, let us not forget those who have spent Christmas in POW camps in God-forsaken stalags or the Hanoi Hilton.

(From left) Sgt. Alison Bates, Sgt. LeAnne Jackson and Spc. Veronica Flores
sing a Christmas melody for Soldiers at Camp Liberty, Iraq, Dec. 23.
The singing group, "Minority Report," is part of the 1st Cavalry Division Band.
Photo by Pfc. William Hatton. This photo appeared on www.army.mil.

This season calls to mind that sometimes not even the deadliest of wars can stop a celebration of Christmas. Easily the best known example occurred in 1914 when unofficial cease-fires took place on the Western Front and German and British soldiers left their trenches to meet in No Man’s Land to gather and bury their dead – and to exchange small presents and drink together. What these soldiers understood was that there was no good reason for the slaughter that was only beginning and in the ensuing four years would consume the youth of both nations in the mud of Flanders, the trenches of the Somme, and at Verdun where as many as 800,000 soldiers of both sides died in a senseless siege that militarily achieved nothing. Nearly a century has passed since the start of the so-called Great War and to my mind it remains the most monumentally stupid conflict ever waged in the history of mankind.

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