Requiem for Ty Ziegel

~We wanted to use a photo of George W. Bush next to an unreconstructed Ty, but it has been taken offline following Ty's death 12.26.12.  --lf

[NOTE: Some readers of our initial post misunderstood our intention.  They thought we were saying that Mr. Ziegel did not deserve taps, or that we were exploiting his death to further an antiwar stance. 

My purpose was to indict a hypocritical populace which loves the vicarious feel-good story scabbed onto a tragedy as if to eradicate or ameliorate the latter, and whose hypocrisy shows no interest in following the story out to its bitter end. 

The below letter was sent to a national newspaper, in an attempt to have Ty Ziegel's death recognized.]

Dear Ed.,

It is New Year's Day, and no national news outlet has seen fit to remember Ty Zeigel, the grotesquely combat disfigured Marine who died a week ago after falling on ice outside of a bar in Metamora, Illinois. Oprah Winfrey devoted a program to him and his bride in 2006 when the Love Conquers All fairy tale was the spin.  Now, a week out, no major news service has even noted his ignoble death.

Ty died 26 Dec 2012, almost eight years to the day after he was grievously wounded while on a routine patrol during his 2nd Iraq tour when a suicide bomber blew up near his truck.  Ziegel underwent 50 operations and a 19-month recovery.

We were all voyeurs when he was feted by the press for his soon-to-be failed marriage to his high school sweetheart, and Nina Berman won the World Press Photo competition for portraiture in 2006 for her series on Ziegel. We love the hero spectacle, but not so much the lonely death.

Cause of death has not been declared, though one of two small online Central Illinois newspaper notices mentioned the autopsy showed that he had an enlarged heart.  The embedded video link in the story is broken. Tyler Ziegler's Wikipedia page has been taken down. 

There are those who will say, "He volunteered ... hard cheese, old boy.  Them are the breaks."  Harsh, and perhaps true.  To be sure, we are all here on borrowed time.  But Ty was robbed of the vicissitudes of a life in the service of a questionable national goal.

For Ty Ziegel, we could say, proximal cause of death: cerebral hematoma.  Distal cause: Unjust discretionary war.