Santos R. Armijo remembered

I was honored to receive a message on my answering machine from Tina Armijo but embarrassed by what she told me, which was this: "Thank you."

Tina wanted me to know that she appreciated an article I had done that mentioned her son, Spc. Santos R. Armijo, who was killed in Taji, Iraq, on Oct. 2. The message was left the evening before her 22-year-old boy's funeral, so I decided to wait a few days before calling her back.

In the meantime, the family of another Arizona soldier, Sgt. Nicholas Sowinski, 25, learned that he, too, had been killed in Iraq, adding to our long list of war dead.

"I heard the news about that other soldier," Tina Armijo told me. "How awful for the family. It's tough to go through. You try, you know. That's all you can do."

Tina headed this week to Fort Hood, Texas, where her son had been based and where a memorial service was to be held in his honor.

Spc. Armijo, known as "Bear," was scheduled to return home within the month, and his mother had promised him that she would visit him in Texas.

"Our plan was for me to go there for Christmas and spend time with him," she said. "But I'm going now. I'll get to see where he lived and where he worked."

It's not the same as greeting her son at the airport and squeezing him in her arms, but she will take it. She has no choice.

Santos Armijo, like Nicholas Sowinski, voluntarily joined the service. Tina Armijo wasn't thrilled with the idea.

"He went to college for two years, but this is what he wanted to do," she said. "He was very determined, so we went along with him. We were proud of him."

Earlier this week I heard from a woman whose daughter was a high school and college friend of Sgt. Sowinski. He'd been to her house for dinner and to watch TV. It hit her hard to lose someone she knew, she said, and to think that it could have been her own child.

Perhaps the cruelest irony of the Iraq war is that the commitment and self-sacrifice of young soldiers like Armijo and Sowinski allows the rest of us to be even more apathetic and self-centered when it comes to the conflict. And also when it comes to the people we elect and who send young soldiers into harm's way.

All of that would change if today's extended deployments caused enlistment to drop to the point where a military draft was needed and suddenly our sons and daughters were at risk. On Wednesday, Sen. John McCain said that we need more troops in Iraq. Where will these new soldiers come from?

"My son planned to come back and get married, then get a job with the FBI, working SWAT," Tina Armijo said. "And he wanted to buy a truck. He really wanted a truck. He was happy, funny, and always looking to the future. I was glad that some of that about him came out in the paper."

So she called to thank me. We didn't speak about the rightness or wrongness of the war. Or about political candidates or the elections. It wasn't necessary. Her family's sacrifice says all that we need to know.

If it were your son's neck on the line, or my son's, the choices that we make between people like Jim Pederson and Jon Kyl, Harry Mitchell and J.D. Hayworth would be seen for what they really are: matters of life and death.

Just ask Tina Armijo.

From the Arizona Republic

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