Perspective: For families, war's pain lives on

Michael E. Curtin

The war in Iraq is with Joan and Michael J. Curtin every day.

It's there when Michael Curtin passes the overstuffed bookcase in the living room that has become a memorial to the couple's oldest child. It's there again when Curtin heads off to his job as a mechanic and puts on the camouflage cap his son the soldier once wore.

For Joan Curtin, the war is a part of her nightly commute home from work. The trip almost always includes a stop at St. Anne's Cemetery in Wall Township, where she spends a few minutes at the grave of her son, Army Cpl. Michael E. Curtin, the first service member from New Jersey to die in Iraq.

The war returns at the end of the day when Joan Curtin, a nurse, makes her nightly check of the Pentagon Web site for an updated list of the names of the fallen -- a list that reached the 3,000 mark yesterday.

"I just want to read the names," she said recently as she sat at her kitchen table in Howell. "It breaks my heart. I know what the families will be going through."

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