Committed to remembering all of the Goodrich High School students who are now soldiers in Iraq, GHS Teacher Bill Duso ran the names of approximately ten soldiers across the school’s marquee this week.
The move commemorates the five-year anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq on March 19, 2003.
Duso said as long as he is a teacher at Goodrich High School, he will make sure the students, now soldiers in Iraq, will be remembered.
‘It’s unbelievable to remember that just a few years ago, some of these soldiers were walking up and down the hallways of our school as students. Now, the halls have changed to a highway in Iraq,? said Duso.
A sobering thought, Duso said, is to realize that the friends and students he went to high school and college with in 1967 who served in Vietnam are still dealing with the ravages of that war. The soldiers in Iraq and their families, he said, will have to do the same.
While no official soldier count of those from the Brandon and Groveland Township area that have served, or are currently in the war, is available, several dozen have been in contact with The Citizen over the past five years.
The first report came in March 2003, when Douglas Newberry, then 18 and a 2002 Brandon High School graduate, was deployed in northern Iraq soon after the start of the war. Newberry was part of the United States Infantry 173rd Airborne.
Last summer on July 5, Pfc. Joseph A. Miracle a 2003 Brandon High School graduate died July 5 from wounds sustained from hostile enemy fire in the Watapor Valley of Kunar Province, Afghanistan. He was 22.
To date, he is the only known local fatality as a result of the war.
More recently, Ty Gucwa, 23, a 2003 Brandon High School graduate, was injured when a bomb exploded on Jan. 29 in the streets of Baghdad.
According to newspaper reports, five Fort Carson, Co. soldiers including Gucwa, a member of 4th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, attached to 2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault) were wounded in the blast. All were expected to recover.
The bomb was detonated near a checkpoint where American and Iraqi troops search people and cars near a residential neighborhood of Ameriya.