"They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest

Uncoffined – just as found…"

So begins the lines from a Thomas Hardy poem that was quoted in the movie, The History Boys, by a character called Posner, played by young Samuel Barnett, to his literature instructor and tutor, Hector, played by Richard Griffiths.

The gaggle of British schoolboys in the movie have scored high enough on their end-of-school exams to qualify for admittance to Oxford, and have been held over for another term of strict tutoring so that they might score as high as possible on Oxford's incomparable entrance exams.

Their headmaster hopes to also "polish" the working-class lads a bit as well, because he knows that they will be competing with young men and women who have had access to far finer schooling and the sophistication of travel and exposure to culture that wealth can provide. The year is 1983, and they must do it the old-fashioned way, through long hours in the library and rigorous academic trials put before them by their teachers.

The movie was written by Alan Bennett, and was based on his play by the same name.

In this scene, Posner is reciting an obscure poem on battlefield graves, and there was something about the timeless words and the earnest young face onscreen as he spoke them that caught me so unawares that I did not even know I was weeping until the scene ended.

"They throw in Drummer Hodge to rest
Uncoffined--just as found.

…And foreign constellations west Each night above his mound.

 …Young Hodge the Drummer never knew – Fresh from his Wessex home –

 …why uprose to nightly view

Strange stars amid the gloam.

Yet portion of that unknown plain

Will Hodge forever be;

His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,

And strange-eyed constellation reign

His stars eternally."

When Posner sits down with his teacher to discuss the poem about a teenage drummer-boy younger than himself, Hector points out a little-known fact:

"The important thing is, Hodge HAS a name," Hector says to his student.

"Say Hardy's writing about…the Boar wars, possibly. These were the first campaigns where soldiers--common soldiers--were commemorated. The names of the dead were recorded and inscribed on war memorials.

"Before all this," he explains, "soldiers, private soldiers, were ALL unknown soldiers.

"And so far from being revered, there was a firm in the 19th century--in Yorkshire, OF COURSE," he adds with great disgust, since they live in Yorkshire, "which swept up their bones from the battlefields of Europe in order to grind them into fertilizer."

Watching this scene on Mother's Day weekend, I was so flabbergasted by that knowledge that I could not comprehend it for a moment. It is common to refer to soldiers as "cannon fodder" or as "expendable,"--but to think that all those mother's sons were treated like so much MANURE to be bought and sold in the marketplace after giving their lives in battle and tossed into an unmarked grave--did their mothers ever even know what had happened to their boys?

Hector goes on: "So, thrown into a common grave though he may be, he's still Hodge.

"Lost boy though he is, on the far side of the world…

"He still has a name."

On that day, I knew, three of our American boys had undergone something so horrible as to defy imagination.

Why, oh why, I have asked myself over and over, did some platoon leader or CO somewhere down the line send out a small convoy of only two Humvees, carrying seven soldiers and one Iraqi translater, on a pre-dawn patrol into one of the deadliest areas in Iraq?

Not only is the "Triangle of Death," as they call it, infested with Sunni insurgents, but it contains an active element of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Less than one year ago, two other soldiers had been kidnapped in that same area and were found later mutilated, tortured to death, and their bodies rigged with explosives.

From what I've read, it would seem that these troops were some of the freshly-arrived "surge" troops, but I could be misunderstanding what I've read.

All we know for sure is that, at about 4:45 in the morning, another unit could hear sounds of explosions and could not reach the patrol. Fifteen minutes after that, a drone aircraft showed two burning vehicles. A rapid response team was called out but it wasn't all that rapid--it took them another forty minutes to reach the burning Humvees, where they found four dead soldiers and a dead translator.

Some of the soldiers had been shot, some died in the bombing. All were unrecognizable.

And three were missing.

Maybe I know too damn much for a Marine mom.

Maybe Marine moms aren't supposed to know what was most likely happening to those boys while I was sitting in my Texas home watching a movie, but it was in my thoughts the whole day. Off and on, I searched internet news sites and watched the T.V. news, but there wasn't a whole lot more information.

It got to be Sunday.

Mother's Day. All day long, three mothers were going through the worst agony imaginable for their lost boys.

I switched between three networks looking for something, ANYTHING on the news.

Not one mention could I find.

Now, granted, I only have access in my rural home to the three networks. I don't know if CNN or MSNBC was doing hourly updates. All I know is that the network news reports did not even mention the attack, the four dead soldiers, or the three missing boys.

On an al-Qaeda website, a group took responsibility for the kidnappings, but displayed no proof that they really had the boys.

They're lost.

"They throw Drummer Hodge to rest
Uncoffined, just as found."

These lost boys--these mother's sons--have no name to the barbarians who took them.

They will be blamed for all the crimes committed against humanity by "weekend armchair warmongers", as Sen. Barack Obama referred to the civilian war-planners when he spoke out against this war in 2002.

Men who, in my estimation, have no souls.

Though these lost boys are surely innocents, they will be held accountable for the sins of those who sent them into war with no plan to bring them home.

How many of our young men and women have left a part of their souls soaked into the Iraqi desert like blood?

I've been reading Barack Obama's book, Dreams from My Father. It it, he describes his first trip to Kenya, birthplace to his father, when he was a young man in his twenties.

Meeting family for the first time, he was puzzled when an aunt or other relative would say to him, "Make sure you don't get lost again."

Finally, he asked his half-sister, Auma, what they meant. She explained that it was a saying that referred to a person you hadn't seen for a while. When a loved one would move away, relatives would say, "Don't get lost."

Then she explained that there was a deeper, more serious meaning.

"If someone moves away," she said, "They promise to return…No one sees them again. They've been lost, you see. Even if people know where they are."

We are lost in Iraq.

All our soldiers and Marines are lost over there, even though we know where they are, and even though those who sent them away promise that there is a purpose to their absence, and they promise us that we will see them again.

But sometimes, we don't get to see them again.

And then they are truly lost.

You turn on the evening news, and the most horrible thing that could ever happen to them does not even merit a two-minute story in the broadcast.

So many in this country go about their lives, and they are not touched by this war. Not really. They may know someone--a neighbor, a friend from high school--who is fighting in Iraq, but they don't have the same visceral gut knowledge of living every day in hell because a loved one is in the most terrible danger imaginable and there is nothing you can do to protect them.

Not even if you are their mother.

It is so easy to say SUPPORT THE TROOPS.

But who among us can NAME one?

Not a casual acquaintance. Someone who, if they were thrown to rest "uncoffined," you would grieve for the rest of your life?

I write, and all of us who have family in the military…

We write so that all our soldiers and Marines will have a name.

Because whether they return to us or not, a part of them will always be lost in a strange land, beneath strange-eyed stars.