Sgt. Anthony G. Jones, fresh off the plane from Iraq, sauntered unannounced into his wife’s hospital room in Georgia just hours after she had given birth to their second son, an impish grin on his face.
For two joyous weeks in May, Jones cooed over their baby and showered attention on his wife.
But he also took care of unfinished business, selling his pickup to retire a loan, paying off old bills, calling on family and friends.
“I want to live this week like it is my last,” he told his wife.
Three weeks later, on June 14, Jones was killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad during his third tour in a war that is not yet three years old. He was 25.
“It was like he knew he wouldn’t come back,” said his grandmother Ima Lee Jones, who buried Jones near her home in Sumter, S.C.
“He told me, ‘Grandma, the chances of going over a third time and coming back alive are almost nil. I’ve known too many who have died.”‘
Jones’ tale may be unusual in its juxtaposition of birth and death, but it has become increasingly common among the war dead in one important way: One in five of the troops who have been killed were in their second, third, fourth or fifth tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As the nation pays grim tribute to the 2,000 service members killed in Iraq since the invasion of 2003, their collective stories describe the painful stresses and recurring strains that an extended conflict, with all its demands for multiple tours, is placing on families, towns and the military itself as they struggle to console the living while burying the dead.
“Two tours is more than you should ask anyone to do,” said Randall Shafer, 51, an oil industry consultant from Houston whose son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Eric Shafer, just finished his second tour in Iraq. “They know they could die anywhere at any time. That will take a toll on anybody. And it takes a toll on their families.”
The milestone of 2,000 dead was marked Tuesday by a moment of silence in the Senate, and President Bush said that “the best way to honor the sacrifice of our fallen troops is to complete the mission.”
But the nation seems as divided over the war as it did in September 2004, when the 1,000th death occurred during a heated presidential campaign.
Multiple deployments have clearly embittered some families, driving them to push their children and spouses to quit the military.
But others say the willingness, sometimes sheer determination, of loved ones to return to battle has made them see a deeper value in the mission, no matter how deadly or open-ended it may seem.
“I thought initially that we should never have gone to war,” said Karen Strain, 51, of North Hero, Vt., whose son, Marine Cpl. Adam Strain, was killed by a sniper in August.
“But now I feel we have to finish the job,” Strain said, pausing to fight back tears. “Adam gave me more insight for how sad it is for those people and how we can help give them their freedom. Adam changed my views.”
Like Jones, more than 300,000 U.S. troops have served more than one tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them in Iraq.
But just how those troops and their families are coping with repeat tours is the subject of much study and debate, as repeated deployments to a war zone are a relatively new phenomenon.
In World War II, many service members deployed for the entire war. In Vietnam, conscripts typically served single 12-month tours, rotating through units that remained at war.
In dozens of interviews, parents and spouses described the seven- month Marine or 12-month Army deployments to Iraq as periods of unremitting tension.
Thomas Southwick of San Diego said he stopped watching the news during his Marine son’s third tour of duty, which ended in September.
“You’re just a constant nervous wreck,” Southwick said, “waiting for a knock on the door.”
Many parents said they found second and third deployments more gut-wrenching than first ones, partly because they had learned from their children about the gruesome realities of war, and partly because death seemed to loom larger with each tour.
“How many times can you go out there and be so lucky?” Diana Olson of Elk Grove Village, Ill., said she told her 21-year-old son, Marine Cpl. John T. Olson, after his second tour.
He re-enlisted for a third tour in 2004 and was killed when a bomb caused his truck to tip over in February.