Friday, March 28, 2003 | 4:32 a.m.
IT IS TYPICAL in the nation's capital for our attention to get hung up on the policy debates and political skirmishes over Iraq, on the Pentagon press conferences and White House reactions.
All that stuff is a convenient distraction from the most uncomfortable reality of war: people die.
That's an especially hard truth given the popular expectation of the war: The United States was supposed to quickly overwhelm Iraq with a "shock and awe" campaign of bombs and missiles that would render resistance weak. The expectation that American troops would advance largely unscathed, as they did in the last Persian Gulf War, shattered.
Last week we met the first U.S. soldiers to lose their lives in this conflict, including Marine Lt. Fred Pokorney Jr. The strapping, 31-year-old father, husband and former high school star athlete from Tonopah was killed during fighting at Nasiriyah.
For those who loved Pokorney most, his death gave new meaning to shock and awe.
Former Nye County Sheriff Wade Lieseke was the father-figure who had taken a teenage Pokorney into his home after Pokorney's guardian, an aunt, died. Lieseke was lost in his thoughts, his voice softened to a whisper as he spoke with a National Public Radio reporter for a story that aired Thursday. It was the voice of a broken man sizing up the odds.
"One hundred and eighty-some thousand Americans in Iraq," Lieseke said, "and one from Tonopah was killed."
Before the bloodshed began, many were curious about the war's much-anticipated massive first strike. A sense that the war was inevitable had gripped us over months of buildup. We were ready -- eager even? -- to see the war's thunderous beginning and its quick ending.
But we were not ready -- not really ready -- to see U.S. troops and innocent civilians, die.
We understood before those first military strikes that death is a part of war. We braced for the news. But inevitably it hits even harder than expected, and it utterly rocks the worlds of people like Wade and Suzy Lieseke, and Pokorney's wife, Carolyn Rochelle, and their 2-year-old daughter, Taylor.
For the Liesekes, shock and awe is reverberating in the dusty little desert town of Tonopah 7,400 miles from Nasiriyah.
True shock and awe is inspired not just by the relentless bombardment of cities, or in the brilliant and violent explosions that reduce massive buildings to ash and rubble.
Shock also grips the psyche in the quiet, still moment when someone first hears that a son or husband is gone for good. Shock reverberates as the news settles in; a new wave of shock struck when Lieseke received a letter from Pokorney several days after the Marine died.
"It's the worst empty feeling you can have," Lieseke told me last week. "I can't describe anything worse."
Awe is the sensation that settles in during those miserable days when the brain and heart try to come to grips with loss unlike any other. To be awed is to be caught in a surreal swirl of moments that follow The News: condolences from neighbors, hugs from strangers, questions from reporters, memorial service preparations, phone calls from members of Congress making the calls that they dread most.
That hole left in the life of the grieving is awe-inspiring.
"I have not come to grips with this," Lieseke said. "I am still trying to imagine this really happened."
In life, there are only a few people that you truly miss and yearn to be around again, Lieseke said. "Fred was those people for us," Lieseke said.
Lieseke, a decorated Army veteran, bitterly opposes the war.
"I saw so much of this in Vietnam, I prayed to God that I would never have to see it again, especially with Fred," he said. "There is just no justice in the world when people like Fred die."
No doubt the Pentagon accomplished its mission in that many Iraqis were shocked and awed by the war launched by the United States. But they were not the only ones.
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