I attended a particular set of meetings that I found eye opening and heartwarming – I met with elementary school students to talk about Iraq.  

Last week I had the powerful experience of visiting our dedicated soldiers who were wounded while fighting in Iraq at Landstuhl Medical Center in Germany.  I was not alone in that visit – students from across our district, places like El Dorado, Strong, Pine Bluff, Hot Springs, and Prescott, armed me with more than five hundred home made get-well cards to help me thank our men and women in uniform for their service and their sacrifice.   I can’t tell you how proud they were to have been part of freeing the Iraqi people, and how appreciative they were of the support from Arkansans.

They made me promise to go back home and thank our students for brightening their hospital stay and helping to lift their spirits.  This week, I was able to visit with some of the students who made the cards, and they were full of questions about this war.  The students wanted to know how the soldiers got hurt, if they were going to return to their families soon, if the soldiers were scared, and they wanted to know if our soldiers won the war.

I told them that our soldiers fought hard to protect America from Saddam Hussein and to free the Iraqi people, and that as long as we were proud of our soldiers for what they did, that yes, they did win the war – for us and for the people of Iraq.