“The mission cost nearly 4,500 American and well more than 100,000 Iraqi lives and $800 billion from the U.S. Treasury. The question of whether it was worth it all is yet unanswered. After a ceremony Thursday in Baghdad formally marking the end of the war, the timing and all other details of the departure of the last convoy were kept under tight secrecy out of security concerns for about 500 troops and more than 110 vehicles that were part of it. The low-key end to the war was just another reminder of how dangerous Iraq remains, even though violence is lower now than at any other time since the 2003 invasion.” – (Source: AP Article – Click here to read the remainder of the article.)

And so “end” the hostilities of another American war. The men and women who are the American military served in the name of the nation. The men and women who are the American military, overwhelmingly, served bravely and honorably as have generations before them. To what end?

And so, the sons and daughters who are the American military leave Iraq; the war, there, is no more for them.

They will be returning from war as those before them returned. To what?

Far greater minds have asked these questions before.

Sir Winston Churchill once said, “One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War’.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “War is an instrument entirely inefficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses.”

Will Rogers quipped, “Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it… You take diplomacy out of war, and the thing would fall flat in a week.”

War begins on personal basis for the families; this article remembers the “First and last Americans killed in Iraq War.” It is uncertain who will be the last casualty of that war.