- April 28, 2004 — The Pennsylvania National Guard has seen is first guardsman killed in action since World War Two. Thirty-year-old Sherwood Baker was killed Monday.
He was searching for weapons of mass destruction around Baghdad when a suspected chemical warehouse exploded. Sergeant Baker was raised in Philadelphia's West Mount Airy section.
Baker leaves a wife and nine-year-old son JD in Luzern County. Baker grew up in Philadelphia, attended Roman Catholic high school where his peace activist mom Celeste Zappala says Baker protested the first Gulf war. Zappala says she raised all her sons to oppose war. She is bitter about the Iraq War calling it Bush's false war.
So how did the child of a pacifist family end up in an armored regiment in Iraq? His family says to supplement his income as a social worker and help his community Baker signed up in the National Guard 7 years ago. When ordered to Iraq a month ago Baker live up to his commitment to his unit.
So as the rest of Zappala family marched against the war, believing it is a war about oil. Sgt. Baker did his duty and said little.
His family says Sgt. Sherwood Baker was an American True believer, a patriot who gave his life in an unjust, unneeded War.
While his personal views of the war haven't been presented, it's hard not to infer that he wasn't exactly in support of it. But, nonetheless he went and did his duty, much like John Kerry did.
I don't want to politicize Baker's death. It's a horrible tragedy, like every other death in this war, and my thoughts go out to his family. But, the point I'm trying to make is that some people understand the concept of "duty" far more than the couch potato warriors and the chickenhawks who have attacked Kerry. To them, the fact that Kerry served in a war he didn't believe in and then came home and protested that war is a somehow a contradiction or character flaw. One can believe in living up to, and even transcending, the obligations of citizenship even when those obligations are in conflict with each other. One can serve and protest.
...more on Baker here and here.