Tobiasly’s Blog

Just as the media disproportionately portray the progress we have made in most of Iraq, so too do they slant their reporting on the parents of soldiers who have been killed in battle. If you just listened to the major media outlets, you might think that anti-war zealots who are quick to turn their sons’ sacrifice into whatever media attention they can grab typify that group.

Here is a story about a different group of parents that I doubt you’ll be hearing much about in the news. After their son Justin was killed in Sadr City, Iraq, Jan and Joe Johnson decided to make a perilous trip to Iraq to bring some closure to their son’s death, to find out why he died and what purpose his sacrifice served.

They traveled with several other parents to Iraq as guests of the Kurdish government. Everywhere they went, they were treated as heroes and thanked for their sacrifice.

One mother, Debra Bastian, who handed out wallet-sized photos of her son was brought to tears when she handed the photo to an Iraqi woman whose two sons and husband were killed during Saddam’s rule. The woman took the photo, tucket it into a framed picture of her husband and sons, and said "now your son is my son."

Bastian said of the trip, "I needed to make that trip. All of us were very, very disappointed in the media coverage over the war. I had so many avenues that were telling me different, that there were good things happening in Iraq, that they were just reporting the bomb of the day."