Of Heroes and Polemicists

First things first ... I'm with Frank.

Not to demean the deceased or belittle the berserk, but between Anna passing away and astronauts going nuts, I'm ever more grateful for the existence of ESPN. Well, that was before Bum's kid committed the unpardonable sin - going to work for the Dallas Cowboys. So what am I left with?

How about the striking realization that while an exorbitant amount of news coverage will follow every twist, quirk, and turn of the Anna Nicole Smith saga, there will be precious little coverage of the likes of these American heroes:

One was a Navy medic, the other a Marine sergeant. Both begged to go back to Iraq for another tour of duty. A third followed her brother into the Marine Corps and, eventually, into the war.

All three died this week as stepped-up security operations intensified fighting.

Seaman Manuel Ruiz, 21, from Maryland's Eastern Shore was among seven people killed when a Marine transport helicopter crashed in Anbar province Wednesday, his family said.

Marine Sgt. Joshua J. Frazier, 24, from Virginia's Spotsylvania County was killed by a sniper Monday as he stood on a rooftop in Ramadi, the Pentagon and his family said yesterday.

And Marine Cpl. Jennifer M. Parcell, 20, of Bel Air, Md., died Wednesday in Anbar province in what the Defense Department described as "supporting combat operations."

...

Frazier wanted to be a police officer after graduating from high school, but after Sept. 11, he decided he was going to join the Marines, Mallin said. His mother, Shelia Cutshall, tried to talk him out of it. So did Mallin. They told him not to make a rash decision in anger. They told him to wait a year.

Ten months later, Frazier told them he was still determined to become a Marine. His elder brother, who works for a defense contractor, also tried to persuade his brother to pursue jobs with the Marines that might reduce the risks of combat. But that was not for him.

"He wanted to be an infantryman. He wanted to be a grunt," Mallin said. In telephone calls and notes from Iraq, he expressed concern about the men in his unit with wives and children. "You got the sense that if he could, he would send them home," Mallin said. "He really was quite honorable and passionate about what he did."

Mallin said his younger brother was "fed up" by the mounting doubts expressed back home. After returning from a seven-month tour in April, he began lobbying to go back.

"He begged. He pleaded. He asked for transfers," Mallin said. "Everybody in the family wanted to talk him out of it. But they knew they couldn't."

Not long ago, I caught part of the National Review symposium on CSPAN. Among the complains that Mona Charen made was that we weren't getting good detail on the heroes of this current war. In specific, she mentioned we didn't know the names of the heroes. She bemoaned how hard it was to get the names out of the White House and how the liberal media wasn't running stories on such things (regardless of the initial complaint, apparently).

I checked to see how many columns Charen has written about the names of these heroes. Nothing. Run a search on her columns for the word hero and here's what you get:

Your search terms didn't find anything.

That's pretty damned telling.

SIDENOTE: Via Will Bunch, there's another great read on Editor & Publisher regarding Jennifer Parcell.