Jeremiah joins a list of kids who won’t be coming home

Collier E. BARCUS, 21. Jeremy J. Fischer, 26. Joseph M. Garmback Jr., 24. Paul C. Mardis, 25. Dustin W. Peters, 25. Sonny G. Sampler, 23....

These are among the soldiers and Marines killed during the fighting in Iraq. Their names were released this week by the U.S. Defense Department.

Young men with ordinary names from ordinary places, they add to the growing total of 900 U.S. servicemen who have died in both combat and noncombat situations since the beginning of military operations.

And they add to the total of 112 deaths of soldiers from Britain, Italy, Spain, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, Thailand, Denmark, El Salvador, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia and the Netherlands.

And they add to the estimated 13,118 Iraqi civilians killed in the shattered homes and streets of Baghdad, Samarra, Al Anbar, Tikrit, Mosul, Talafar, Hillah and in desert stretches without names or identities.

That’s 14,130 human beings, children and adults, whose lives have been lost in a war we have no business fighting.

The figures are monstrous, and one wonders where it will all end, or if it will all end, or if, like a Holy War, it will go on destroying the lives of generations to come. Jihads, rooted in the emotions of their combatants, never seem to end.

War, defined by its individual casualties, its dead and its maimed, assumes a level that can never be quantified. The life of a young man or woman killed in combat is far greater than any statistic. It matters that thousands are dead, but it matters more to those who loved him that Jeremiah W. Schmunk, 20, of Warden, Wash., is dead.

He was the only child of Shirley Schmunk, a widow who supported him by driving a school bus as he grew up in the farming community in south-central Washington, where they grow wheat, green beans, beets and potatoes. He had telephoned her the morning he was killed, a call that lasted 34 seconds. He said, “I don’t have time to talk. I called to say I love you and I’m OK. Goodbye. Gotta go.”

That afternoon, his life, barely lived, was ended when his vehicular patrol came under attack by rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire. That goodbye to his mother was his last.

Statistics are emotionally unrevealing. They mean little unless they become names, and not even then unless we give them shape and form. I could tell you that more than 10 million humans on both sides died in World War I, and 17 million in World War II, and 1.3 million in Korea and 2 million in Vietnam, but without a personal connection, they disappear like birds startled into flight and gone in the distance.

I wanted to know something about at least one of those on the list of dead released by the Defense Department. I was able to reach Jeremiah’s uncle, John Daly, who told me about the kid who used to ride his bicycle through the quiet streets of Warden, who went fishing with his dad and worked side by side with him on their small vegetable farm, who cried when his dad died, whose first car was a raspberry-painted pickup, whom the kids used to taunt with the song lyric “Jeremiah was a bullfrog” and who graduated from Warden High, into whose gymnasium his flag-draped coffin was brought by a military honor guard just a week ago.

“Everyone knew him,” Daly said, “and everyone liked him.” You can tell that by the picture in the local newspaper, the Tri-City Herald. The gym was crowded with people from Warden and from the surrounding communities of Richland, Pasco and Kennewick, and a lot of them were crying. His uncle, describing the kind of person he was, talked about how Schmunk and the men in his platoon gave out candy to kids in Baghdad, showing them how they could throw it into the air and catch it in their mouths. That’s the kind of kid-like amusements 20-year-olds offer, they’re that close to childhood themselves.

Schmunk joined the National Guard for the experience and the college benefits, feeling the urge, as I once felt it, to venture into a system that seemed so new and foreign, never realizing how close it would take him to the edge. The young rarely think about dying, and the old never think about the possibility of having to bury their kids, but that’s the way it was for Shirley Schmunk and the relatives, friends and neighbors around Warden, remembering the boy on the bike who laughed a lot.

“He was growing up,” his uncle said, choking back tears, “into being a fine young man.”

You see what happens when you elevate a number to a face? You’re drawn into a life that ought to be continuing. He should have come home in that raspberry-toned pickup, not in a coffin. They should have been playing “Jeremiah was a bullfrog,” not taps.

Good God, what are we doing to our kids?

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Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.