Uncommon Valor

A must read article from The Washington Post:

The day before Sgt. Maj. Michael B. Stack left for Iraq, he talked to his brother, Cecil, about death.

The men, both career soldiers, knew risk well. Cecil had been stationed in Panama, Haiti and Grenada. Michael was a Green Beret, a member of the Army's elite Special Forces, and had served in the Persian Gulf War during his 28 years in the military.

But Cecil Stack, now a retired Army sergeant major living in Alexandria, saw Iraq "turning nasty" and knew that his brother, at 48, was within two years of retirement and had six children back home at Fort Campbell, Ky.

"I said, 'Mike, be careful, because this war takes sergeants major,' " Cecil Stack recalled. "It's a mobile job. You don't stay locked behind doors; you're not at a desk."

Michael Stack responded: "I need to go and do this. I need to take my unit over and bring my unit home."

On Easter Sunday, the war took Mike Stack. He was killed during an ambush by small arms fire while manning a .50-caliber machine gun on a Humvee patrol near Baghdad. In the last e-mail Cecil Stack received from his brother -- within two weeks of his death -- his brother said that things were going pretty well and that he would explain it all over a good glass of red wine when he got home.

Yesterday, under a blue sky striated by the white contrails of jets, Stack was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery.

Read the whole thing at the link above. Sergeant Major is the highest enlisted rank in the Army, a rank held by 1% of the enlisted force at any given time. Generally speaking "gunner" is no longer in the official job description.

But Sar' Majors get to write their own job descriptions.