Troops at war honor the fallen

May 31, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

BAGRAM AIR FIELD, Afghanistan

U.S. forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq remembered friends and colleagues Monday in solemn Memorial Day ceremonies to commemorate all of their nation’s war dead.

As some soldiers paused, violence raged on in both places.

In Afghanistan, U.S.-led NATO forces launched airstrikes against Taliban insurgents who had forced government forces to abandon a district in Nuristan, a remote province on the Pakistan border. NATO also said it killed one of the Taliban’s top two commanders in the insurgent stronghold of Kandahar in a separate airstrike.

At the sprawling Bagram Air Field, the largest U.S. military base in Afghanistan, about 400 soldiers in camouflage uniforms and brown combat boots stood at attention for a moment’s silence as Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of some 94,000 U.S. troops in the country, led the ceremony.

A bugler played taps, and a color guard displayed the U.S. flag and the flags of units serving in eastern Afghanistan where the base is located, about 30 miles north of Kabul.

A steel construction beam from the World Trade Center destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was unveiled, with the inscription “WTC 9 11 01.” The beam was donated by citizens’ group the Sons and Daughters of America of Breezy Point, a suburb in Queens, New York, where 29 victims of the Sept. 11 attacks lived, according to a letter read at the ceremony.

McChrystal praised the soldiers for their courage given the likelihood that they will lose more friends during their tours.

“The fact that people are willing to stand up and do what’s difficult, they’re willing to stand up and do what’s frightening, and they’re willing to stand up and do what often costs, really is the measure of not just a person, but of a people,” McChrystal said.

At Bagram, Maj. Sonya Powell, 42, of Cincinnati, said she thought of two people: her executive officer who was killed in an aircraft crash in October and her 4-year-old son, who is waiting for her to come home.

“It’s very hard, but you don’t dwell on it,” said Powell, of the 401st Army Field Support Brigade. “You come here, you do your mission, and you pray.”

McChrystal also visited an Afghan military unit for a remembrance ceremony for 39 Afghan commandos who have died since the unit’s inception in 2006 — a reminder of Afghan lives lost as well.