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GREENSBORO, N.C. ? As the last U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq on Sunday, friends and family of the first and last American fighters killed in combat cherished their memories rather than dwelling on whether the war and their sacrifice was worth it.

Nearly 4,500 American fighters died before the last U.S. troops crossed the border into Kuwait. David Hickman, 23, of Greensboro was the last of those war casualties, killed in November by the kind of improvised bomb that was a signature weapon of this war.

“David Emanuel Hickman. Doesn’t that name just bring out a smile to your face?” said Logan Trainum, one of Hickman’s closest friends, at the funeral where the soldier was laid to rest after a ceremony in a Greensboro church packed with friends and family.

Trainum says he’s not spending time asking why Hickman died: “There aren’t enough facts available for me to have a defined opinion about things. I’m just sad, and pray that my best friend didn’t lay down his life for nothing.”

He’d rather remember who Hickman was: A cutup who liked to joke around with friends. A physical fitness fanatic who half-kiddingly called himself “Zeus” because he had a body that would make the gods jealous. A ferocious outside linebacker at Northeast Guilford High School who was the linchpin of a defense so complicated they had to scrap it after he graduated because no other teenager could figure it out.

Hickman was these things and more, a whole life scarcely glimpsed in the terse language of a Defense Department news release last month. Three paragraphs said Hickman died in Baghdad on Nov. 14, “of injuries suffered after encountering an improvised explosive device.”

He was more, too, than the man who bears the symbolic freight of being the last member of the U.S. military to die in a war launched in the political shadow of 9/11, which brought thousands of his fellow citizens out into the streets to oppose and support it. Eventually, the war largely faded from the public’s thoughts.

“There’s a lot of people, in my family included, they don’t know what’s going on in this world,” said Wes Needham, who coached linebackers at Northeast when David was a student. “They’re oblivious to it. I just sit and think about it, the courage that it takes to do what they do, especially when they’re all David’s age.”

And they were mostly young. According to an Associated Press analysis of casualty data, the average age of Americans who died in Iraq was 26. Nearly 1,300 were 22 or younger, but middle-aged people fought and died as well: some 511 were older than 35.

“I’ve trained a lot of kids. They go to college and you kind of lose track of them and forget them,” said Mike King of Greensboro Black Belt Academy, where Hickman trained in taekwondo for about eight years. “He was never like that. That smile and that laugh immediately come to mind.”

The pain is fresh for people who knew Hickman. But the years have not eased the anguish of those who lost loved ones in the war’s earliest days, when funerals were broadcast live on local television, before the country became numb to the casualty count.

Vicky Langley’s son, Marine Pvt. Jonathan Lee Gifford, was killed just two days into the war. More than eight years later she sits in her Decatur, Ill. home, surrounded by photographs of him and even a couple of paintings of him in his dress uniform that total strangers created and sent her.

She said she doesn’t concern herself with thoughts about the cost of the war and whether it was worth the life of her son and all the others who died.

“Only the Iraqi people can answer that,” she said.

She thinks of her son constantly. She recalls the first day of kindergarten and how she came home and “turned on every appliance I could (because) it was just so quiet without him.” She remembers how as a young man he would call her, without fail, when the first snow of the year started to fall. She still hears the knock at her door at 11 at night, and the chaplain telling her that her 30-year-old son had been killed in Iraq.

And she sees him in the 4-year-old daughter he left behind, who is now 12. Lexie Gifford’s thin frame and face are miniature versions of her father’s, her smile a replica of his. She has the same slow, I’ll-get-there-when-I-get-there walk. For a reason nobody understands, a while back started popping frozen French fries in her mouth just like her dad used to do.

As the last troops prepared to leave Iraq, Langley was getting ready.

“I’ll probably sit and cry,” said Langley, 58. “I’ll be happy for the ones you can be happy for and sad for the ones you are sad for.”

Langley’s life has been one catastrophe after another since her son died. The next year her husband died. Then months later, doctors told her the reason she was feeling poorly was that her kidneys had shut down. That was followed by a fall and a broken back. Today, as she waits for her name to come up on a list for a kidney transplant, she gets around the house she shares with her mother in a motorized scooter.

The one thing she doesn’t have, she said, is guilt. Though she talked her son out of enlisting in the military a couple times over the years, the reasons began and ended with concerns about the safety for her only child.

But after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, she knew there would be no talking him out of enlisting. Besides, she said, “If I was young enough I would have gone in, too.”

Even though the country’s mood was much different in 2009 when Hickman joined the Army, he had no doubts about his decision, Trainum said.

“When I talked with him on the phone a week before, he wasn’t unhappy about where he was or regretting being there at all,” Trainum said. “It was just going to work for him, and he was looking forward to getting his work done and getting home.”

Hickman, Gifford and the others left behind parents and spouses and children like Lexie, whose memories of her Marine father are what one might expect of a girl who was four when she last saw him.

“He popped out of a Christmas box,” she said, of the Christmas just before Gifford was deployed, when he hid inside a large box to surprise his daughter. “He was tall. He had brown hair. He was nice.”

The losses linger for people who saw the flag-draped coffins come home.

“I used to watch all the war stories on TV, you know,” said Needham, Hickman’s old coach. “But since this happened to David, I can’t watch that stuff anymore. I just think: That’s how he died.”

______

Associated Press news researcher Monika Mathur contributed to this report. Babwin reported from Decatur, Ill.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/iraq/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111218/ap_on_re_us/us_iraq_last_death

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AXA Equitable, a life insurance company in Farmington, Connecticut, has created a video game to introduce life insurance to women in their 40s. AXA’s Pass It On! launched on the web in September and now a mobile application is heading to more portable devices. Pass It On! lets players pick an avatar and?walk the streets of New York City collecting gold and avoiding expenses. The character can also buy permanent life insurance (represented in-game as a gold shield worn as a backpack) or term life (a silver shield).

Pass It On! becomes more challenging as the game progresses. New challenges and obstacles appear that can instantly kill the player. Different levels in the game are represented by different U.S. locations. After New York, players go to is St. Louis, New Orleans, Mount Rushmore and San Francisco. The game seems to be at least a moderate success, so far attracting almost 64,000 unique visitors who played it more than 231,000 times, according to the company.

The biggest draw, its creators say, is the sweepstakes linked to the game. Players can enter to win a $25,000 or $15,000 cash prize if they play between now and Dec. 31.

AXA Equitable turned to video games to reach potential customers because of the generational shift in marketing strategies. While the company sees a majority of baby boomers between the ages of 47 and 65 owning policies that provide money at death, people between the ages of 31 and 46 (Generation X) and between 19 and 30 (Generation Y) have no coverage.

“Life insurance sales are at a 50-year low,” notes David O’Leary, head of AXA Equitable’s financial protection segment. He gets his figures from research conducted by Windsor, CT.-based LIMRA. “Some 11 million U.S. households with children younger than 18 have no life insurance. Many of these children would face immediate financial trouble if a parent died.”

Hall came up with the concept of Pass It On! while riding the Metro-North to Connecticut after a conference in New York.

“I went to a social media conference in New York about a year and a half ago, and I heard three stories there that totally inspired me,” Hall said. The most impressive was a game, Mad Men Yourself, which allowed gamers to create a personality within the 1960s Madison Avenue advertising world that is the basis for the hit AMC TV series “Mad Men.” The game helped propel the popularity of the show.

“They were trying to reach the same market that I am,” Hall said. “They were talking about reaching the 35 to 55′s. So, that got me thinking about gamification. Can you gamify life insurance?”

Source: The Hartford Courant

Source: http://www.gamepolitics.com/2011/11/14/playing-insurance-game

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What an important query! Why is self-improvement so important in generating daily life extended achievement? I suggest, it goes without saying, but can you definitely realize daily life extended achievement in any region of your daily life, without initially understanding what your present-day actions are giving you? If your day-to-day actions are not producing the benefits that would make your daily life a achievement, by your terms, what demands to change? If we are the ones that make the benefits in our lives, and I believe we totally manage that destiny, wouldn?t we have to have self-improvement initially prior to our daily life improves? The law of correspondence says, all factors that we develop in our outer globe, are a direct reflection of our interior globe. Truer words have in no way been spoken! Read this Matt Huston Get Him Back Forever Review. So self-improvement is primary in generating daily life extended achievement, since we will get off track. Continuous self-improvement will assistance keep us on track to a superior daily life. What Places of Self-Advancement Really should I Target On? There are so quite a few regions of self-improvement to target on, but I believe that these 3 ought to be focused on initially:

1) Values & Beliefs ? What are your values in daily life? What beliefs do you have that are resulting in you to not be as successful as you would like? Discover them and request yourself, do I have to have to change these values & beliefs to end up profitable in daily life?

My 5 Tested Self Advancement Steps on How to “Live Your DREAM Daily life!” ? A Strong Self-Support Plan

Prior to I get into this, it?s important that you know what self assistance, individual enhancement and self improvement, basically suggest? In a nut shell, it?s specifically what it says on the tin, like Matt Huston. If anything to do with enhancing or acquiring yourself. For instance, job, relationships, health and wellbeing, psychology, and so forth.. Self assistance is basically any kind of information, or resources that assistance you, to assistance yourself.

Has there ever before been a time in your daily life the place you couldn?t wait for tomorrow to come? or even didn?t want to go to rest since you was getting this sort of a great time? You must have felt like that at least the moment in your daily life, suitable? I wager you even have a huge smile on your experience just remembering people ?good times??

Self-Advancement: Hoarding

Television has just lately opened Matt Huston eyes with their weekly sequence entitled “Hoarding”. Many had no strategy that other folks live like people portrayed in the show. Thoughts you, the producers probable search for the most remarkable situations in order to draw a viewing audience via sensationalism. But hoarding does occur in varying degrees ? and not just in “other locations”. Consumers who hoard may well be your family members, associates or neighbours.

Typically they have skilled a traumatic incident or condition which triggers the hoarding. A death, job loss or tragic occasion may well be what is recognized as the beginning position of the issue.A man or woman who hoards normally, more than time, will allow factors to consider the place of relationships. They begin attaching emotionally to things and then are unable to allow go extended adequate to get rid of the things.Things begin taking more than the living and emotional space of the hoarder and soon it is so overwhelming that the man or woman doesn?t know how or the place to get started to begin doing changes. As a consequence, the hoarder continues to collect even a lot more factors approximately them with the hope that they will carry comfort. But they don?t. In truth, frequently the piles end up so huge that the man or woman doesn?t even know what is there.Things end up so out of manage and the particular person tends to isolate from the globe even a lot more than they had at the starting. Loved ones and associates are not invited or welcomed into the environment since the man or woman feels shame about the condition and doesn?t want any ridicule.It normally normally takes a pro to work with the psychological, emotional and environmental difficulties.Cleaning up the environment does not assure that the behaviours will avoid. In truth, even although the hoarding gets a issue it is basically the consequence of a psychological disorder. The initial issue is the way that the man or woman thinks and acts. If there isn?t best suited remedy for the hoarder, the hoarding will carry on. Some of the households on the show indicate that they have cleaned up the house various occasions and can?t know why that isn?t adequate.The man or woman who participates in an best suited treatment system is normally relieved and content about the changes that occur as a consequence. In truth, relationships that had previously been distanced are frequently restored once again ? only this time in a healthy and balanced method.

Self-Advancement ? Sports activities Psychology and Self-Perception For Results Beyond Failure

Any sportsperson who would make it to the major of their game will have endured quite a few hrs, quite a few months, and quite a few years of committed education. There is no this sort of point as an ?overnight success? whilst, to the viewing public, it occasionally seems that way.

Many sacrifices will no doubt have been designed along the way and not quite a few athletes will endure the rigours of competing at the greatest stage without suffering durations of enforced relaxation ? frequently lengthy ? via damage. So what retains an athlete heading? What gives them the strength to select up the pieces and consider once again once disappointing setbacks?

Source: http://pre-litartificialchristmastree.info/self-advancement-content-articles-developing-life-long-accomplishment

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