Amid dialogue of service and sacrifice, a memory of how one general remembered his fallen

— -- The death of four American soldiers in Niger this month has prompted an important national dialogue about service and sacrifice.

I have seen that sacrifice up close for many years covering conflict around the world. For me, one of the best and most vivid examples of the respect that these heroes and their families deserve came in 2004.

The commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division at the time, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, lost 168 soldiers under his command during that violent year in Iraq. It ripped his heart out.

As he prepared to fly back to Ft. Hood, Texas, for a memorial service honoring the fallen, he sat in his Baghdad headquarters reading through an inch-thick stack of index cards. Each card had the name of a soldier who was lost, along with the names of the surviving family members.

Chiarelli wept as he read the cards, memorizing the names on each one.

I wrote about this memory in my book, "The Long Road Home."

“The thought of not recognizing a mother or a spouse or a child who’d lost a loved one sickened him. He thought of his own wife and the three children they had raised together. If my child had been killed, I would expect his commander to know me, and to know how my son or daughter had died, Chiarelli thought. If it were my child, I wouldn’t care much that there were 167 others. For me, there would be only one loss that really mattered."

As the country continues to discuss the Oct. 4 events in Niger, I encourage us all to remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice to protect the values the United States holds so dear, and those families who will forever live with the loss.

The complete epilogue, which recounts Chiarelli's story, is below. I urge you to read it and watch the upcoming National Geographic Channel miniseries based on “The Long Road Home,” which begins Nov. 7.

DEEP INTO A LUKEWARM February night in 2005, Major General Peter Chiarelli sat behind the sagging piles of sandbags that fortified his Baghdad headquarters, staring at an inch-thick stack of index cards. The commander of the First Cavalry Division was only weeks away from the end of his year in Iraq, but the cards he was holding took him back to the beginning, to those first bloody days of April 2004.

Months earlier, Chiarelli had moved from the large tent where he’d lived and worked when he first arrived in Iraq; his new headquarters was inside a long row of buildings near the ornate Baghdad “water palaces” used by Saddam Hussein. The former Iraqi president, captured several months prior to the arrival of the First Cav, now sat alone in a prison cell within the same compound, surrounded by First Cavalry soldiers.

Chiarelli’s own office bore no markings of war. A huge mahogany desk and conference table, shipped to Iraq aboard a military cargo plane, dominated the room. Computers and phones lined the desk, along with a cupful of candy for visitors. An American flag hung on the wall, and a half-empty box of Chiarelli’s beloved cigars sat on a table underneath. It could have been the office of a patriotic executive in Cleveland. Only the fifty-four-year-old general himself, seated behind his desk long after midnight, provided clues that this was a combat zone. After a day in the field, a layer of dust covered Chiarelli’s desert fatigues; a 9mm pistol hung from his shoulder holster; mud filled the crevices of his knee-high tanker boots. And then there were the index cards he held before him.

Chiarelli had asked his aide to prepare the cards, and he’d begun to put in extra hours memorizing the information they held. But now he was struggling. Though it had been a wrenching year full of pain and loss and heartache, he now realized he was still not prepared for the emotional wallop these cards delivered.

Each bore the name of a soldier. These men and women had come to Iraq thinking they would be part of a reconstruction mission, and had been sent back home in flag-draped coffins. Typed beneath each name were a few words about how the soldier had died and what family members were left behind. The fallen soldiers were all husbands or wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters. Many had been killed by an enemy they probably never saw.

Generals don’t like to cry. But Chiarelli, a charismatic and physically imposing officer, had found himself crying often during his deployment. As he read the names of his fallen soldiers now, his eyes grew moist and his back stiffened. He had attended every memorial service in Iraq, save for one when his helicopter broke down and he couldn’t get there in time. He wept on each occasion; this night was no different.

The cards for the soldiers killed on that first night of battle were at the top of the stack. Not since Vietnam had the First Cavalry suffered so many casualties in a single day. Number one was the card for Sergeant Eddie Chen, the first soldier shot that night. Next came the cards for specialists Stephen Hiller, Ahmed Cason, Robert Arsiaga, and Israel Garza. There were cards, too, for Corporal Forest Jostes and Specialist Casey Sheehan, who died within a few hours of each other; and for Mike Mitchell from the tank division.

For Chiarelli, that Sunday night in April had been the most difficult of the war. The families back in the States had been devastated by the losses, especially because they came so soon after their loved ones had left home.

Chiarelli had been in constant touch with his wife, Beth, who had helped care for the families. Like his soldiers in Iraq, the spouses at Fort Hood bonded together in tragedy. But those painful first days for the families and the soldiers were followed by many more. Chiarelli’s First Cav soldiers had fought for eighty straight days to retake Sadr City. That fight was followed by another violent surge in August in Najaf, which brought on another sixty days of combat. And then there were the daily IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that killed more soldiers than anything else in Iraq.

The violence that began with the ambush of Lieutenant Shane Aguero’s platoon claimed the lives of 168 soldiers from the First Cavalry Division over the course of the yearlong deployment and left about 1,900 wounded. By historical standards, the casualty toll was not so high. During the seven years the First Cav was deployed in Vietnam, from 1965 to 1972, the division lost more than 5,000 soldiers, with more than 26,000 wounded. More than 19,000 American soldiers died during just six weeks of fighting in the Battle of the Bulge in Belgium in World War II. But for General Chiarelli, the eight U.S. soldiers who died in Sadr City on the night of April 4, 2004, carried momentous significance. He had spent thirty-one years in the army, and until that night no soldier under his command had been killed in combat.

Black Sunday, Chiarelli realized, had marked a turning point for the U.S. military in Iraq. It was the day the war took a horribly unanticipated turn, shifting from a peacekeeping mission into a full-fledged fight against an insurgency. Across the country, facing a new enemy, the United States soon found itself, again and again, in the same position as Aguero’s platoon in that Sadr City alley: ambushed, unprepared, bloodied, and alone. Chiarelli had brought his First Cavalry soldiers to Iraq with the expectation of a reconstruction and stabilization mission, one for which they would be welcomed by the Iraqi people. Instead, they were forced to fight a war to which their combat training did not apply. After Vietnam, the U.S. military had vowed never to wage a counterinsurgency war again—indeed had largely stopped preparing for the possibility. In the year since Chiarelli had arrived in Baghdad, however, he had learned what so many commanders before him learned, and always the hard way: The enemy has a vote.

Chiarelli hadn’t personally known any of the soldiers who died on April 4, though by the end of the year their names were ingrained on his consciousness. It would take some work to learn the stories of the other 160 soldiers he had lost that year as the insurgency took root.

Halfway through the stack, Chiarelli came across the name of Captain Dennis Pintor. Everyone had known Pintor. The 1998 West Point graduate was a superb leader and a gifted athlete. He had been a company commander under Colonel Robert Abrams, and Chiarelli had heard the excruciating details of Pintor’s death from Abrams himself, who had known Pintor since the young officer entered the army and had considered him a friend. Chiarelli recalled how Pintor’s death had brought a replay of some of the horror Abrams had experienced in the Eagle base aid station on April 4, the first time the brigade commander had seen any of his soldiers die.

On the October night in 2004 when a roadside bomb tore through Pintor’s Humvee, Abrams was sitting in his base camp less than a mile away. Abrams had become accustomed to the sounds of war, but this blast was so powerful it shook the thick concrete walls of his headquarters, and he immediately inquired about the blast.

“Sir, it’s bad,” the voice on the radio said. “It’s Dennis.”

Abrams paused. “Dennis?” he barked. “Dennis Pintor?” His eyes filled with such intensity and pain that it was impossible for others in the room to look away. Initially refusing to believe that his friend had been killed, Abrams decided he had to see for himself. Forcing himself to stay calm, he walked quickly to the base medical station where the soldiers had been taken. For the next two hours, inside that trauma center, Abrams saw images that reminded him of the horrors of Black Sunday. The soldier who’d been next to Pintor in the Humvee was lying in pieces. Dead. His legs—boots still on—and his severed arm had been placed next to his body. Another soldier lay nearby, moaning in pain; he would die a day later.

Then he saw what he’d come to see, what he’d dreaded seeing: Pintor’s lifeless remains, his body blown apart.

Dennis was gone.

Pintor’s company had been so devastated by the loss of the three soldiers that night that Chiarelli himself boarded a helicopter and flew down to visit them. Inside a makeshift chapel, the general sat down with eighty young soldiers and talked intimately with them, saying how important their work was, how proud he was of them. Months later, in the stillness of his office, Chiarelli took another look at Pintor’s card:

Survived by wife, Stacy, and four-year-old daughter, Rhea.

All the soldiers in Pintor’s battalion knew about little Rhea. The young captain had used his home video camera to tape a skit for a going-away party for a fellow officer. On the night of the party, Pintor rewound the tape too far, andinstead of seeing soldiers hamming it up, the partygoers saw Pintor’s daughter happily collecting Easter eggs.

“There she is, ladies and gentlemen,” Pintor had said, beaming. “Rhea Pintor waving to her daddy!” For a moment, the soldiers watching the video were taken back to their own loved ones.

Chiarelli would have no trouble recalling Stacy and Rhea Pintor. He thought again about some of the others who’d been left behind. Stephen Hiller’s wife, Lesley, and their kids. Eddie Chen’s parents, who thought their son would be attending law school after his stint in the army. Casey Sheehan’s mother, Cindy, who’d become an outspoken antiwar protester in the months after her son’s death and a vocal critic of the First Cavalry Division that Chiarelli led. He didn’t judge her; he’d never lost a child, and he respected her right to grieve the way she wanted to grieve. He hoped to meet her at an upcoming memorial service at Fort Hood, to tell her that her son had died an honorable death, but he doubted she would come.

Chiarelli wanted to meet all the families, to know all the families. The thought of not recognizing a mother or a spouse or a child who’d lost a loved one sickened him. He thought of his own wife and the three children they had raised together. If my child had been killed, I would expect his commander to know me, and to know how my son or daughter had died, Chiarelli thought. If it were my child, I wouldn’t care much that there were 167 others. For me, there would be only one loss that really mattered.

ON APRIL 4, 2006, exactly two years after Black Sunday, Chiarelli stood on the parade ground at Fort Hood, under a clear blue sky, facing the families of his fallen soldiers and those who had come to honor them. The “Gold Star” families—those who had lost a soldier in Iraq—sat together on folding chairs arranged in neat military rows. It was on this parade ground that many had said goodbye to their departing soldiers for the last time, and it was here that the fortunate ones had welcomed them back home. Behind Chiarelli was a magnificent black granite monument, etched with the names of 168 First Cavalry soldiers who had died in Iraq. In the preceding year, Chiarelli had taken operational command of all U.S. forces in Iraq, but he had returned to Fort Hood this day to dedicate the monument.

The First Cavalry Division band played Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” Then it was Chiarelli’s turn to speak.None of us here today will forget the sacrifices of these Americans. Pride is not a powerful enough word to describe how I feel about each of them. We remember them, not only for who they were, but also for what they stood for. They were rooted in duty, love of country and “service to others. We pray that the families will find some measure of peace in knowing that their loved ones represent the very best this country has to offer, and that they lived and died as heroes. We hope their loved ones, the husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, children and friends, will find comfort in knowing we will never forget their sacrifice. I see their young faces in my mind’s eye every day of my life. That will never change.

Lieutenant General Chiarelli met with as many families as he could after the memorial ceremony. Hours later, the general, still thinking of the soldiers’ names on the black granite wall, kissed his wife goodbye, boarded a plane, and headed back to Baghdad.”