Parents of slain soldiers make pilgrimage to Iraq

(Lyerly, GA-AP) December 26, 2006 - After her son Justin was killed serving in Iraq, a grieving Jan Johnson promised to see the place where he died and to better understand why it happened.

She and her husband Joe, who also served in Iraq, were among a group of seven parents who lost children in the war who were picked to travel to northern Iraq in November as a scout team for a bigger trip next year.

She says, "I wanted to go find out for myself."

Family members of US casualties of war have made pilgrimages in the past to Vietnam and other war zones where their sons and daughters died.

But the fighting in Iraq was far from over, so it took a nonprofit organization called Move America Forward to organize a trip.

A plane flew the families into Arbil - the capital of the Kurdistan region in northern Iraq and one of the safest areas of the country.

The Johnsons were never able to go to Sadr City, the rough-and-tumble Baghdad neighborhood where Justin Johnson was killed by a roadside bomb in April 2004. Yet the group's members said they nevertheless found a cause worth fighting for in Arbil.

That's where they said their sons were treated as liberators and the parents welcomed as heroes.
WIStv

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