Dec. 31, 2011 - Vickie McLaughlin looked down at the Aug. 24, 2005, letter from her son, Vermont National Guard Spc. Scott McLaughlin, and began to read part of it out loud.
“I’m pretty safe,” she said, her voice calm and clear as she spoke her son’s words. “I’m not out doing foot patrols or kicking down doors like the other guys so don’t worry much about me.”
She stopped reading and looked across the room toward her husband, Kevin. Outside on a late afternoon in December, an American flag and the green-and-blue battle flag of the Vermont Army National Guard hung limp from a flagpole in the McLaughlins’ front yard.
The letter, sent to a church the McLaughlin family attended, was the last one Scott McLaughlin wrote. He was felled by a sniper’s bullet Sept. 22, 2005, while standing guard at an observation post on the outskirts of Ramadi, Iraq.
Six years after the loss of their son, the McLaughlins are still working through the pain of his death. It’s been even tougher for Scott McLaughlin’s wife, Nicole, left to raise two children on her own. She’s still not ready to talk publicly about his death, Kevin McLaughlin said.
Vermont is dotted with families who, like the McLaughlins, lost a relative in Iraq during a series of Vermont Guard deployments to the war-torn country during the past decade. Altogether, 33 people with Vermont ties were killed in Iraq, including 10 in the Task Force Saber deployment to Ramadi that included McLaughlin.
With the last American combat troops having exited Iraq, families are left to hope the losses they suffered at least will render Iraq a better, more democratic country.
“He died for a good cause. What comes of it, I’m not sure,” Kevin McLaughlin said of his son. “I can’t imagine him dying for nothing.”
Vickie McLaughlin put it a different way.
“I hope the people over there stay on track,” she said. “Like he says in the letter, Scott was trying to do good over there. He felt he could help those people.” read more>>>
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