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Casualties have now reached a level such that the Senate passed a resolution on Thursday, 97 to 0, calling on the White House to get over whatever arguments it is having with NATO, the U.N. and the rest of the world and get our soldiers more help on the ground. "We will get a lot more support from the Iraqis, who will be a lot less suspect of us, if we are not the only game in town," said Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden. But the reverse holds as well: if security and stability are not restored quickly, the insurgents may find more allies within the rest of the Iraqi population. There's a race under way, to wipe out the resistance and get the country moving before the frustration boils over. And the U.S. military has only a limited amount of time to prevail.
Chris Coffin loved being a soldier. "In Chris' family, that was what you did," Betsy explains. "His father expected it, and he just grew up believing in serving your country." Chris joined the Army in 1971, served as a tank crewman for 3 1/2 years, then moved to the reserves, where he was a tank commander. About 10 years ago, he joined a civil-affairs unit and worked for the rest of the time as a policeman or a summer ranger in national parks like the one in Gettysburg, Pa. He would have loved to work at Gettysburg full-time, says his ranger colleague Tim Sorber. But a National Park Service rule sets the maximum age for law-enforcement rangers at 35. Chris was already 45 when he started part-time, though he regularly passed the Army's physical-training tests in the 18-to-20-year-old range. "It was a running joke between us," Sorber says. "Chris was too old to get a job in the park service, but never too old to go to war."
But he was getting older, and the separations were getting harder. He and Betsy, 42, had found a piece of land in Maine and were planning to build a new home, maybe even finally start the family they had never had--unless you counted Samantha, their 18-year-old golden retriever--German shepherd mix. After nine months in Kosovo in 2001, where he turned 50, Chris was ready to come home and stay there. But as it happened, when he went to talk to his supervisor about retiring from the reserves, he learned that the Pentagon had recently announced a "stop loss" order in the wake of 9/11, halting retirements for people with his specialty.
Civil-affairs reservists hand out food and supplies, just the people who would be needed to get Iraq back on its feet once the fighting stopped. In February Chris was called to Fort Bragg, N.C., for training, and by the time the bombs began to fall, he was in Kuwait. "This deployment felt different to both of us," Betsy says. When Chris went to Kosovo, they knew the separation would be hard and that there was still some risk. "But we both knew Iraq was a more hostile environment," she says. It was some comfort to know that a unit like his would be more sheltered: not since Vietnam had a civil-affairs reservist been killed in combat. "We thought he wouldn't be going into Baghdad until things pretty much had been resolved there," says Betsy's sister Candy Barr Heimbach.