U.S. Troops Named Time’s Person of Year

The American soldier, who bears the duty of “living with and dying for a country’s most fateful decisions,” was named Sunday as Time magazine’s Person of the Year.

The choice represents the 1.4 million men and women who make up the U.S. military, which led the invasion of Iraq nine months ago and this month captured deposed leader Saddam Hussein.

About 130,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq.

The troops were singled out as the top newsmakers of the year because “the very messy aftermath of the war made it clear that the mission had changed, that the mission had not been completed and that this would be a story that would be with us for months, if not years, to come,” Time Managing Editor Jim Kelly said.

The selection echoes 1950, the year the Korean War began, when the magazine’s editors picked the American GI for the cover, writing that “it was not a role the American had sought.... The U.S. fighting-man was not civilization’s crusader, but destiny’s draftee.”

The 2003 Person of the Year package features an artillery survey unit from the 1st Armored Division to tell the story of the American soldier.

The magazine’s cover shows three of them -- Sgt. Marquette Whiteside of Pine Bluff, Ark.; Sgt. Ronald Buxton of Lake Ozark, Mo.; and Spc. Billie Grimes of Lebanon, Ind., all members of Survey Platoon, Headquarters Battery, 2nd Battalion in the 1st Armored’s 3rd Field Artillery Regiment, based in Giessen, Germany. Two Time journalists embedded with the platoon were injured in an attack this month.

The magazine calls the troops “the bright sharp instrument of a blunt policy.”

As of Sunday, 460 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, 322 since major fighting ended in Iraq on May 1.