It’s been seven years since Fernando Suárez del Solar buried his son, Jesús. Seven years since March 27, 2003, when just one week into the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lance Corporal Jesús Suárez del Solar stepped on a piece of unexploded ordnance and came home in a flag-draped coffin. When he died, Jesús left behind a wife and infant son, Erik, who even today doesn’t understand what happened to his father.
“He asks me, ‘Where is my dad?’” Fernando says, choking back tears. “‘Why is my dad not here?’ I try to explain that he is in another place, that he watches over and protects us. But my grandson just cries and says, ‘I need my dad, I want my dad,’ and I don’t have the intelligence to explain to him why his dad is not there.”
Jesús Suárez was 20 years old when he died. A native of Tijuana, México, he immigrated to Southern California with his family in the late 1990s and joined the Marine Corps straight out of high school. When he died, he still hadn’t received U.S. citizenship.
“People don’t understand when one person dies, the whole family is destroyed,” Fernando says.
He says the passage of time has not diminished the loss. Instead, it has become more pronounced, even as the Iraq war has receded from the front page to the back page of the newspaper, from the lead story each night on network news to a short weekly segment, overtaken by health care, immigration, and the failing economy.
When Barack Obama was elected president, he lifted a controversial ban, allowing the media to film and photograph caskets of dead soldiers as they arrived at Dover Air Force base, but few media have published those images on a regular basis.
The remoteness of the ...