With the constancy of 24-hour news networks, images of the war in Iraq are indelibly stamped on our minds. Humvees careening across desert sand. Bombs exploding amid crowded marketplaces. Children lining the streets, hands outstretched for soldiers to fill them with candy. Women draped in burkas weeping for their dead. Families on airstrips clutching their just-returned relatives for dear life.

With more than three years of combat behind us, it’s become easy enough for most of us to change the channel when these images flash across the screen. But for some in our neighborhood, it’s not that simple. They don’t associate Iraq with unnamed soldiers on television – for them, the war evokes faces of sons and daughters, husbands and wives.

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Some of our neighbors are still fighting. Others have already returned. Still others are headed back after being called up a second, even third time.

“We’ve got to keep this in the front of people’s minds,” one mother pleads, “It’s there – it’s not going away yet.”

The next time someone mentions Iraq, we hope these faces come to mind.

1ST LT. JEFF LOARING-CLARK, ARMY

AGE: 29

PLATOON LEADER

A bright flash, an ear-piercing blast, then silence. That’s how Jeff Loaring-Clark describes the car bomb that exploded five feet from his Humvee. “My first thought was, ‘I’m going to die now.’ It wasn’t panicked or hysterical, just logical – like thinking I need to turn left when driving down the road.” The explosion sealed his passenger door shut, but blew open the door behind him. So to escape the flames that had already burned his face and hands, Loaring-Clark slithered over the top of his seat and jumped through the back door. He still doesn’t know how he made it out. “There’s barely enough room for someone my size to get over the seat, especially with 60 pounds of gear,” Loaring-Clark says. “It was pretty much God pulling me out of that Humvee.” His parents awoke soon afterward to a phone call with news that their son had been injured, but would live. While he underwent surgery, they wondered how badly he was hurt and assumed that some of the soldiers in the 16-man platoon he led had been killed. But Loaring-Clark’s mother, Barbara, says they felt peace in the midst of uncertainty. Except for a perpetual ringing in his ear, Loaring-Clark fully recovered within two weeks. And all of his men survived, even the gunner, who was most vulnerable with his head and shoulders sticking out of the Humvee. “At least one of us, if not several of us, should have died,” Loaring-Clark says.

SGT. LEE RUSSELL, TEXAS NATIONAL GUARD

AGE: 28

FORCE PROTECTION

Sitting a mere 10 feet away in his gun truck, Lee Russell saw the Hummer hit the landmine and fly into the air. It landed upside down amid plumes of black smoke and dirt, and Russell scrambled to help. “I didn’t see any movement, and at first I thought everyone was dead.” The blast threw the gunner out, which saved him from being crushed by the vehicle, and fractured the arms and legs of another soldier, but everyone survived. The same was true a few months later when Russell’s team followed a suspicious vehicle on a high-speed chase through the crowded Tikrit marketplace. The car sped through an Iraqi police checkpoint and was found abandoned in a residential alley. While waiting for the explosives team, one of the Iraqi policemen began to examine it. “He got up to the driver’s door, took a look inside, and looked back at all of us saying, ‘Bomb! Bomb!’ over and over.” The explosives team dismantled what turned out to be more than 2,000 pounds of explosives wired to the car stereo, and once again, Russell and his team were safe. But back in Lake Highlands, his mother, Rhonda, was well aware that her son’s base was mortared almost daily, and she worried. To cope, she sent out e-mails searching for other parents with children in Iraq. “That became my salvation,” she says. “It made me feel like, OK, there’s a lot of people involved in this, not just us.” Russell spent almost all of 2005 in Iraq, and though he saw his share of tragedy, what he observed also gave him hope that the reign of fear established by Saddam Hussein was giving way to Iraqi independence. “I really, truly do believe that we are making a difference over there. I saw kids’ faces when they had running water for a change; you bring them flip-flops, and that made their whole world. I would go back for a year, two years and do it all over again.”

CAPT. JEFF KING, MARINES

AGE: 29

STAFF JUDGE ADVOCATE

Bullets don’t always hit their targets. So it’s Jeff King’s job as battalion attorney to ensure that the innocent people of Fallujah are compensated for the fallout of his fellow Marines’ “soft touch,” which ranges from shattered tea sets to dead children. Cash might seem like a callous response to an accidental death, he says, but “over here, dollars go a long way and can keep the rest of the family healthy for a couple years at least.” Accompanied by a platoon of Marines and a sergeant carrying almost $2 million in a backpack, King regularly makes the rounds to assess damages and injuries then shells out crisp $100 bills. (The lack of red tape surprises him, he says.) It’s also King’s responsibility to make sure his battalion knows the rules of engagement – “everything from whom we can shoot to which buildings we can target for detonation” – and to verify evidence on each detainee so he can “make the call whether he should be sent up the river or not.” The ’94 Lake Highlands graduate is in Iraq by choice; he joined the Marine Corps while in law school and extended his tour of duty two years to be in his current assignment, which ends in October. “Don’t regret that decision one bit – I’m growing every day,” King says. His parents couldn’t be more proud, but because his father, Joe, served in Vietnam, they have their concerns. “We’re not worried as parents that anything horrible will happen to Jeff,” says his mother, Cissy. “We’re worried as parents what he’ll see and what he’ll go through…” she trails off, “but he’ll be fine.”

SGT. MICHAEL LEEMAN, ARMY

AGE: 27

ASSISTANT FIRE SUPPORT

When a second-grade classroom sent boxes full of toys to Michael Leeman’s unit, he decided to deliver them to a school in a small village known for its hostility toward American soldiers. At first, the Iraqi children were frightened, but by the time the soldiers had passed out every last one of the jump ropes and hacky sacks, their excitement was evident. “These children don’t have the comforts and freedoms that you and I have enjoyed all of our lives,” Leeman wrote to the second-graders. “But that’s why we’re here – to give them that freedom!” In Tel Affar, where Leeman is now stationed, the situation is fairly peaceful, but his unit spent nine months in Mosul before turning over duties to Iraqi forces. During that time, he saw his share battles and skirmishes, including one in which a comrade lost his legs. Leeman’s parents knew he was fairly secure in the heavily armored Stryker tank he drove, but they also knew he was never fully safe, and still isn’t. “We have a feeling he protects us from the difficult things,” says his father, Dave. One of the hardest struggles for Dave Leeman is hearing criticism about soldiers from people who disagree with the war. “They hae a right to that opinion, of course, but sometimes it feels like they don’t respect our son’s choice to serve his country. They (the soldiers) don’t deserve the ugly things that are coming at them by default.” But such negativity is far outweighed by the outpouring of support from friends and even strangers, Dave Leeman says. His son returns to U.S. soil this month and will be attending officer candidate school in the fall.