Free Republic

Hope Rides Alone USA Sgt. Eddie Jeffers, USA (Iraq) February 1, 2007 Editor's Note: This piece by Sgt. Eddie Jeffers, "Hope Rides Alone", was mentioned in a segment on Fox News Channel's O'Reilly Factor. Click here to listen to or download the segment. I stare out into the darkness from my post, and I watch the city burn to the ground. I smell the familiar smells, I walk through the familiar rubble, and I look at the frightened faces that watch me pass down the streets of their neighborhoods. My nerves hardly rest; my hands are steady on a device...

In a February essay distributed widely online, a young soldier in Iraq weighed the importance of his mission against what he said was an ungrateful American public. “America has lost its will to fight,” Sgt. Edmund Jeffers wrote. “It has lost its will to defend what is right and just in the world.” On Wednesday, the 23-year-old Fort Carson infantryman in his second tour in Iraq died in Taqqadum of injuries suffered from a noncombat-related accident, the Army said. SNIP In “Hope Rides Alone,” his essay posted in February on Free Republic, a Fresno, Calif.-based conservative Web site, Jeffers offered...