Erie, Pennsylvania is a small city on the edge of a great lake. It is a quintessentially American community — so much so, in fact, that it was designated an All-American City by Richard Nixon in 1972. Like many such cities, it has gone through some painful changes over the last few decades as its old industrial economy gradually gave way to a 21st-century technology/service/tourism economy instead. But Erie still typifies what most Americans look for in their home towns: wide streets, good schools, low crime rates, affordable housing, and a generally pleasant quality of life for its citizens.

And like the residents of most American home towns outside the Beltway and between the polarized left and right coast megalopolises, people in Erie are basically centrist by nature. They may differ widely on specific individual issues, but for the most part they share common values and common beliefs with each other and with the hundreds of millions of other Americans who live in what is sometimes referred to as “flyover country.”

Politics is something that people do care about in Erie, at least when it impacts their daily lives in some particular way, but they don’t obsess about it. They may lean left or right, but they do so with their feet planted firmly in the middle of the road. During the 2004 race, George Bush’s single largest campaign-rally audience was in Erie. But in 2004, Erie voters chose John Kerry over George Bush by a solid margin. Professional pundits and politicians and prognosticators do well to pay attention to what happens in Erie, because it is and always has been a bellwether burg for how the American electorate looks at the world.

That’s why today, while Senators on both sides of the aisle are busy debating the Levin-Reed-Kerry Amendment to the Defense Authorization Act that would begin to put the brakes on the Bush administration’s ongoing escalation of its dishonest war in Iraq, it’s appropriate for us to look at the human costs of making war as seen through the eyes of quintessentially average Americans, as told in the words of four reporters for the award-winning Erie Times-News newspaper.

Two funerals in two weeks. Two flag-draped coffins. Two men who gave the last full measure of devotion for the country they chose to serve. And one mother of two sons in harm’s way, waiting and hoping and praying that they’ll come back home alive again this time.

As Times-News reporter Erica Erwin wrote on July 4,

Alan Sargent stood on the tarmac at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport and placed his hand over his heart.

Fifteen yards away, Northwest Airlines Flight 1740 had rolled to a stop outside gate C6.

Sargent watched, waiting, while members of the ground crew crawled through the plane’s belly into the cargo hold.

Minutes passed before he saw the flag-draped coffin pass from the hold onto a conveyor belt.

“There he is,” Sargent said to himself. “There he is.”

[...]

Travelers walking through the C terminal at Cleveland Hopkins paused, pressing their faces against the window panes as a military honor guard marched in lock step to the plane and carried the coffin to a waiting hearse.

Passengers, asked to stay onboard, watched from their seats above.

A baggage handler dressed in shorts and a fluorescent green vest joined police, fire and airport officials in saluting as the coffin passed by.

And as Times-News reporter Andy Boyle wrote in a follow-up story on July 8,

Nancy Donald looked down when the three rifle shots rang out at the Girard cemetery Saturday. Those shots originated from an old military custom of halting the fighting to remove the dead from the battlefield.

That’s just what happened to Donald’s uncle, U.S. Airman Sgt. Richard Sargent.

[...]

Spectators lined the streets, some standing in front of motorcycles holding American flags and dressed in biker gear. Others were wearing high school ROTC garbs or veteran hats. Lawn chairs were set up and people were watching from their porches.

The bikers came from New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland. A couple were from Florida. They were the Patriot Guard Riders, about 80 strong, and they came to pay their respects.

“It’s a little sad, but also joyous,” said one rider, David Cullen. “He’s finally coming home.”

Sargent’s flag-draped casket was taken out of the funeral home and put onto a horse drawn carriage. The police signaled for traffic to stop, and the final leg of his long sojourn home began.

He traveled down Church Street. Family, veterans and Patriot Guard followed him on foot.

Men and women on the sides of the street snapped to salute as Sargent passed. Others took pictures with cell phones and cameras.

He entered the cemetery to strains of John Williams “Hymn to the Fallen.” The music fit — it’s from “Saving Private Ryan.”

Daniel Edder, the funeral director, said he remembers what was going through his mind when the casket came off the plane in Cleveland.

“It’s been such a long road for Richard,” he said, his voice wavering in front of the cemetery crowd. “Amen — he’s home.”

The honor guard lifted the flag off the casket. They started to fold it in slow, deliberate movements, making sure it was packed tight. It had to be perfect, with one honor guardsman stating, “This flag represents duty, honor, custom.”

The flag was to be given to Donald. An honor guardsman inspected it, making some final touches and pulling it tight.

Then he slipped in three rifle shells from that old military custom of firing. One last inspection, and then the slow, deliberate walk to Donald.

Donald nodded as he handed her the flag. Her eyes welled up.

Her uncle was finally home.

Those compelling descriptions of a fallen warrior’s long last ride home sound all too familiar to Americans by now. Over 4,000 men and women have made the same sad journey home from Iraq and Afghanistan in the past six years. Richard Sargent came home to a hero’s welcome, but there’s one important difference between him and those 4,000 others. His last ride home was a lot longer than theirs could ever be.

Richard Sargent was a flight engineer on a B-24 Liberator bomber that went down in the trackless mountain jungles of New Guinea in April of 1944. The wreckage was finally discovered in late 2001, teams from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command began excavating the site in 2002, and the last of the remains were finally identified this past April.

It took 63 years to bring Richard Sargent home from New Guinea to Girard, a small town halfway between Erie and the nearby Ohio border. But bring him home they did. He was laid to rest with full military honors, surrounded by friends and loved ones. His sacrifice deserved no less than that.

And Raymond Buchan’s sacrifice deserved no less than that, too.

As Times-News reporter Amanda Palleschi wrote on July 14,

There were the rituals expected at military funerals.

The flag waving at half-staff.

The leather-vested motorcycle riders from the Patriot Guard.

The measured steps of uniformed members of the 99th Regional Readiness Command in Pittsburgh, carrying the silver coffin.

The crisp white gloves. The folding of the flag that Army Sgt. 1st Class Raymond R. Buchan died protecting.

Then there were the moments at Buchan’s burial on Friday that no one choreographed.

The soldier who buried his face in a tissue.

The gifts for Buchan’s family — rosary beads wrapped in a plain, white plastic bag, because “Ray wouldn’t have it any other way.”

The friends who sat waiting outside the funeral home, nervously smoking cigarettes, clutching tissues, not saying a word.

Bob and Jane Zawadzki, standing in their yard on Vista Drive behind Dusckas Martin Funeral Home, arms crossed, watching at the foot of their driveway with their flag hung at half-staff.

Laura Buchan might remember those moments from the day she buried a husband and father, a man whom Maj. Gen. David Huntoon called a “clear and decisive leader” who put the needs of others before his own.

[...]

Raymond R. Buchan, 33, was killed July 1 when insurgents opened fire on his unit in Ta’meem, Iraq, just west of Baghdad. He served with the 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment, part of the 1st Infantry Division.

He spent four years as an Army recruiter in Erie, where he met his wife, Laura, 27, an Erie native. The couple lived in Germany, where he was based, with sons Hayden, 8, and Andy, 1.

[...]

Huntoon presented Laura Buchan with her husband’s Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, honoring his valor in a time of war.

“He was both tough and compassionate. He was courageous in this fight, and even more courageous when the fight was over,” Huntoon said. He recalled how Buchan listened to everyone who approached him and made friends with Iraqi police officers.

“He made any task look effortless with his smile.”

[...]

As the procession assembled around the tent with the coffin and the soldier and the flag, Laura Buchan sat at graveside, her hands cupped over her mouth as they lowered her husband’s body. She held the folded flag close to her heart and walked up to say goodbye.

Raymond Buchan’s long last ride home took less than two weeks — a much shorter trip in time than Richard Sargent’s 63-year journey, but the same lifetime’s length of loss for his wife and children and loved ones.

In another small town just south of Erie, Dawn Lackovic is hoping and praying that she won’t be the next one to receive an American flag folded into the shape of a triangle. That’s all she can do… except to wait. And wait some more.

As Times-News reporter Robb Frederick wrote on July 16,

No, she didn’t see the news.

Men with air-conditioned haircuts second-guessing her sons? Talking cut-and-run before Iraq is free, its streets safe, its people grateful? She doesn’t need that.

If something bad happens — something gather-the-family bad — the Marine Corps will come for her. Dawn Lackovic will watch them drive up the dirt road, past the pond with the lazy paddle wheel, past the fence she decorated with ribbons cut from a dollar-store tablecloth, and she’ll know before the first word.

Until then, the news is just a nuisance.

“The less I know, the better off I am,” Lackovic says, settling into a porch rocker on a quiet morning in Cambridge Springs.

That’s not to say she doesn’t worry. She does. The boys had trouble after their first deployments. Their tempers coiled, poised like cornered diamondbacks. Their dreams were bad.

During a visit with their father — in an Arizona town called Baghdad, if you can believe that — one of them got drunk and a little mouthy and was shot with the hot end of a police Taser. He spent the night in jail.

And now they’re back in Iraq. Pfc. Bryan Gregory, 22, works in light-armored reconnaissance. Sgt. Nathan Gregory, 24, is a communications officer. This is his third trip.

“People say that God won’t give you more than you can handle,” Lackovic says. “Well, I told him: I’m at my limit.”

[...]

She knows the risks. Bryan Gregory suffered post-traumatic stress disorder and struggled with an inner-ear problem after a bomb exploded under his transport, ripping into his backpack. Nathan Gregory left a 2-year-old at home.

She talks to her mother, Ann Haight. She flies the flag, too.

“I’ve kind of swayed a little,” Haight says of the war. “But when my grandsons tell me they are making a difference, I have to believe them. They’re the ones who are over there.”

Bryan Gregory is due home in October. His brother will follow him out in March.

Lackovic will keep the flag out.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she says. “I would love for my kids to come home. But if they come home before it’s done, before they finish the job, everything they’ve sacrificed, and everybody who has died — it all will be wasted.”

She sits on her porch, and she rocks a while longer. The television stays off.

A small city on the edge of a great lake. Three families, three stories. Two funerals and a waiting. All-American moments being played out against the backdrop of an unjustified, untenable war, like thousands of others just like them across the country every day the Bush administration is allowed to keep putting American sons and daughters in harm’s way, surrounded by the lethal chaos of an Iraqi civil war a half a globe away.

In Erie, citizens pondering the fate of our troops and the Iraqis around around them struggle with their conscience and try to their reconcile their longtime belief in the fundamental rightness of America with their growing awareness of the fundamental wrongness of the Bush administration’s failed policies in the Middle East. All across the United States, in flyover country and on the coasts, in sleepy small towns and bustling big cities, average Americans are watching and waiting to see what happens in Washington this time.

And in Washington, as the Senate debates the Levin-Reed-Kerry Amendment today and will continue to address similarly-purposed legislation in the days to come, Senator Kerry keeps reminding his colleagues on both sides of the aisle what the Buchans and the Lackovics and all the others who’ve lost or still risk losing loved ones in Iraq already know:

You don’t sacrifice American soldiers’ lives for pride or politics. That’s the bottom line. And I think we have the the opportunity to take that position in the Senate now, and I hope we’ll find a responsible center.

... [It’s about] what a lot of people are feeling, which is a very deep frustration to build a truly bipartisan policy that strengthens the country, represents our interests in the region more effectively, and serves our larger strategic interests with respect to the Middle East peace process and security for the region.

... Why now? Why this debate now? Why do we have to, as Sen. McCain asked, “keep taking up the Iraq issue?”

The answer is simple — and compelling: because American soldiers are dying now.

Because the escalation is a failure, now — and we know it. Because when a policy isn’t working, you don’t wait for some artificial timeline to fix it. You fix it now.

The time to fix it is now.