My apologies, but I had to put the entire article written by Bill Johnson of the Rocky Mountain News:

Boots tell haunting tale of losses in Iraq

October 11, 2006

From a distance, it looks like a lot of nothing, or at least - based on what both papers had said - a little oversold.

Just boots.

Even so, you get out of the car, cross the street and wade in. It took most people, by my totally unscientific study, about five minutes before the first teardrop fell.

I hadn't planned on this, to write of "Eyes Wide Open: The Human Cost of War," the display in Civic Center of 2,748 pairs of combat boots, each representing a soldier who has died in the Iraq War.

I was driving past the park when I noticed it. I'd been to the war, knew guys who had fallen.

OK, I figured, let's just see how accurate this is, see if they had every dead soldier's name. I went looking for one in particular.

They envelop you, the boots do. It is an odd thing. The soldiers whose names are attached to each pair never wore them. Yet you stare.

Each pair sits exactly four feet from the next, all of them positioned in long, perfectly aligned rows.

"People say it looks like a cemetery, Arlington National, mostly," said Claire Ryder, the exhibit's volunteer coordinator.

"I say it's worse because it is boots, with names, photos, memories and actual lives attached."

Maybe that accounts for the haunting feeling. The faces of the dead stare out from many of the boots in large, laminated color photographs - many are Army-issue portraits, in which the soldier is unsmiling.

Teddy bears, plastic flowers and American flags adorn some. Sunflowers and Halloween candy are stuffed in one pair, both placed there by the dead soldier's mother, who had flown in from California a day earlier to see the exhibit.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization, has shown the exhibit in more than 80 U.S. cities. Colorado is its last stop this year.

The committee keeps a large stock of tissues that volunteers, who include ministers and psychologists, keep in hand as they slowly walk the perimeter of the display.

Families of the dead added the mementos to the boots at each of the exhibit's previous stops. Some are quite elaborate and include family photographs of the soldiers holding their young children.

The most haunting is what is attached to the boots of Lt. Col. Mark D. Taylor, a surgeon attached to the 82nd Airborne Division.

In a now-laminated e-mail to friends on Jan. 30, 2004, he wrote:

"It is very hostile over here, and we have done over 170 trauma cases over the last five months. Sometimes the Iraqis shoot mortars or rockets at us, but usually they miss. I probably will be coming home in April, so hopefully we can get together.

"See you soon. Mark."

Scheduled to fly home March 25, Dr. Mark Taylor died March 20, 2004, when an enemy rocket hit the telephone booth he had just entered. He was placing a call home to his parents. He was 41.

"I think what gets you are the ages," Claire Ryder says, barely holding back her own tears. "It gets to everybody here."

Ann Griffin, 20, of Thornton, is softly weeping along with her friend, Zeta Conner, 23, of Denver. She had come to see the boots of her husband's best friend, Lance Cpl. Andrew Riedel, 19, of Northglenn, whom she'd known since childhood. He was killed in a roadside bomb explosion Oct. 30, 2004.

"It's so powerful and moving," Ann Griffin says. "I've never thought they got enough recognition. It's so humbling, so heartbreaking."

They stay for more than a half-hour, searching for Andrew Riedel's name. Although the boots are arranged by state, they could not find his name in the Colorado section.

Jody Luna, 53, of Denver, is slowly making her way through the boots. She had read of the exhibit, never figuring for a second the effect it would have on her once she began walking through it.

"You can actually picture the people the boots represent," she says slowly. "It's so sad, just to see the ages."

American Friends purchased nearly all of the boots. Veterans, too, often show up, run home, grab their old boots and donate them.

The mother of Spc. Thomas I. Sweet II, 23, of North Dakota, who died in a roadside blast on Nov. 27, 2003, purchased all 13 sets of desert combat boots that represent the deaths of North Dakota soldiers in the war.

Off to the side, too, is a collection of hundreds of civilian shoes that surround a circular poster-board display of smiling Iraqis in huge color photographs.

The shoes represent the hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqis who have died in the war.

On the other side of the color posters are stark, black-and-white photographs of wailing Iraqis cradling or holding their dead. You just stare.

I did, finally, find the name I had come searching for attached to a nearly brand-new pair of boots.

A simple white plastic flower and a small Colorado flag protruded from them. The small white attached card simply gave his rank, name, age, and state of birth.

I'll just say here that I saluted the boots and said a little prayer. I'll leave it at that.

Bill Johnson's column appears Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Call him at 303-954-2763 or e-mail him at johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com.

Labels: Eyes Wide Open