AL of Threading Water is coming for a visit next week so I'm finally getting off my tush about her wonderful Mother's Day Project. A great many of us are embroidering the names of fallen women soldiers, who died in the Iraq War. It's a shame the US doesn't list names of the civilian casualties so we could embroider them too.
This is Sharon T. Swartworth. She was killed when her helicopter went down just a few days after she arrived in Iraq.
I know AL was overwhelmed by the number of people who wanted to participate in this project and chose the names at random. That she chose a woman who died just short of her 44th birthday and who had an 8 year old son and who was good with computers...not mere coincidence, if you ask me.
I'm not military. I don't go for all this "support the troops" yellow magnet jingo BS in this god-awful war. But Sharon T. Swartworth was a human being. And because of the lies told by the powerful to amass power in the hands of the few, she and a great many others, military and civilian and women and children, are gone.
I'll stitch her name this weekend. Thanks for this opportunity, AL.
This is very cool. More people need to know about this.
ReplyDeleteIt is so absolutely, totally, incredibly heart-breaking to me to see the sacrifices of these people being "hushed" into some kind of rumor, nothing you actually saw, just something you heard about on the radio.
ReplyDeleteI'm disappointed, if I may use so mild a word, with our national media's coverage of the loss, and their acquiescence in not showing returning coffins. What an awful show of disrespect of our troops.
Your doing this might be the broadest dissemination of Sharon Swartworth's name, as most war losses are being treated as "local news." Thanks.
I remember learning of Chief Swartworth's passing in 2003 and became sickened and spritually drawn down by the sad reality of time and chance during war.
ReplyDeleteSo close she came to getting out of the service and yet was denied that nearly obtained goal by mystical misfortune and fatefull destiny.
War is cruel, but to be the one who loses their beloved on the battlefield, is simply...
Hell on Earth.
A sad story, but THANK YOU...Blue Gal...for honoring Chief Swartworth's memory!
It's a wonderful you do and that AL has organized.
ReplyDeleteSeeing the picture of Chief Swartworth, does indeed humanize her death. Not just a random troop, killed serving her country, but an individual who died, leaving behind family, friends, a life.
It's an important reminder as we Americans are encouraged to pretend that this is just business as usual, collateral damage, a death for which Swartworth volunteered for, after all.
Thank you for sharing this.
ReplyDeleteBAC