I’m looking at my screen saver here. It’s a picture of a girl about eight; maybe nine. She has long black braids and carrying a pink rucksack, school bag on her shoulders…white letters on her navy jacket spell out her school emblem in white embroidery; in letters I cannot recognize. The bell-bottom denims flap around her ankles and I can make out Snoopy graffics on her socks.

She walks head down, past two burned out cars smouldering and what looks like a plastic shopping cart… their smoke her companion on her journey down a main street in Baghdad. She has an old-beyond-her-years, determined look on her face. She was obviously on her way to school one day, maybe a couple years ago when I first spotted her AP image. Made her my screen saver to remind me…

More than smoke gets in your eyes after burning and bombings done by our military for anyone in the region.Toxic indeed for all those living or occupying, near the burnings and rubble of Iraq. And now back again too, in Afghanistan?

Is she still alive? I’ll never know.

Soldiers families worry. Oberstar is worried too and enters into the storyline.

I call the girl in the picture Nada. It’s a girl’s name. It also means No in other languages…so it goes.