January was a hard month for Washington state’s military community. It lost five service members who grew up here or served here to fighting in Afghanistan, the most casualties in a single month since July 2010 when seven were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Those numbers of fallen service members remain well below the heavy fighting Joint Base Lewis-McChord soldiers saw during the Iraq surge and during the first months of the 5th Stryker Brigade’s deployment to Afghanistan in the late summer of 2009. But they’re a reminder that difficult days lay ahead even as the Obama administration speeds up its plans to hand over security responsibilities to Afghan forces.
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