As the shock-and-awe of conventional warfare has given way to the unpredictable carnage of terrorism, much of the job of keeping America safe has fallen to the military's most elite soldiers. Delta Force. Green Berets. Navy SEALs. The special operators. But with new threats every day and the men stretched thin, can this new strategy last?
On his last flight home, three months before his death, Joshua Wheeler tore through a copy of D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers. It was the only book he could find in English at a store where he was stationed, near Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan. Wheeler was a master sergeant in the Army, a former Ranger, and a member of Delta Force since 2004. He was the recipient of eleven Bronze Star medals—four of them with the letter V, signifying valor in combat. This was his fourteenth deployment to either Iraq or Afghanistan. As he sat on the plane back to North Carolina, he read a hundred-year-old novel about a struggling London artist.
It was one of the things his wife, Ashley, loved most about Josh—his appetite for knowledge. "He would read whatever he could get his hands on," she says. They were married for two years, and in that time Josh had read more books than she could count. He especially loved history and anything related to international travel—anything that might help him know the world better. He kept a pocket dictionary in his car so he could look up new words at stoplights.
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WNU Editor: My must read post for today.
