Wednesday, April 18, 2007 | 7:10 a.m.
Months after her husband was killed in Afghanistan, Christa Griffith was at an Army post exchange, thumbing through T-shirts, looking for gifts for their three children.
"There were a lot of 'My Daddy is a brave soldier in Iraq' shirts but nothing regarding the war in Afghanistan," the 33-year-old Henderson resident said.
Even more hurtful: She was shopping at Fort Drum Army Base in New York - the base from which her husband, Sgt. John Griffith, was deployed to Afghanistan.
The hurtful slights don't stop there.
Last year Christa Griffith applied to a charitable organization that makes quilts for families of the military war dead, only to be told the quilts were intended just for the widows and parents of those killed in Iraq.
At a war widows ski trip to a California lodge last year, Griffith fumed as she sat through a heroes slide show that featured not one photo of a soldier killed in Afghanistan.
(Through Saturday at least 312 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, according to the Associated Press.)
Even the daily newspaper is a source of aggravation for Griffith. There are stories aplenty about Iraq, but rarely a word about Afghanistan, where an estimated 27,000 U.S. troops of the 45,000 NATO forces still face daily perils.
And so, with the approach of the one-year anniversary of her husband's death in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan, "I am constantly reminded," Griffith said, "that John died in the wrong country."
Griffith is not alone in her feelings of isolation.
Greg Commons, whose son Matthew was the first Nevadan killed in combat in Afghanistan five years ago, says he applied for war death - related private scholarships for his other three sons and was turned down.
The reason, he was told: The scholarships were meant only for the relatives of Iraq war dead.
Commons, a Virginia high school history teacher, says ignoring Afghanistan might come back to haunt the United States.
"Our government declared victory in Afghanistan, but did not finish the job there," he said. "Now there are reports that there is a resurgence of the Taliban. Maybe we should not have forgotten Afghanistan."
Joyce Lindsey of Troutdale, Ore., remains bitter after being called by a reporter looking to interview those whose loved ones died in the war.
When the reporter learned that her husband, National Guard Staff Sgt. Nathaniel Lindsey, was killed in Afghanistan, not Iraq, "he ended the interview," Joyce Lindsey said. It didn't seem to matter, she says, that her husband previously was deployed to Iraq and their son Marcus, 26, also is an Iraq war veteran.
"I think it is ironic that there is so much more interest in Iraq when the terrorists - our reason for going to war in the first place - were and still are in Afghanistan," Lindsey said.
And all those offers of help for survivors of troops killed in Iraq - without the same for those killed in Afghanistan? "A slap in the face of my husband," she said.
Dawn Heister, 32, of Churubusco, Ind., whose husband was killed in Afghanistan two years ago, says she is not surprised by America's lack of remembrance of Afghanistan.
"Few Americans cared about Afghanistan before the war," the mother of two said. "It's a forgotten country, thus it's a forgotten war."
Forty-nine Nevadans have died in the war, 11 of them in Afghanistan.
War critics say they are not surprised that Afghanistan war widows and other family members say they are getting less sympathy.
Freelance writer and anti-war activist Tom Engelhardt says because fewer Americans have died in Afghanistan, it is perceived as the less important battleground. That feeling is compounded, says Ann Jones, author of "Kabul in Winter," by the sense that the U.S. government is less vested in the Afghanistan battle .
Martin Dean Dupalo, a former Air Force intelligence officer in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia who teache s political science at UNLV, says although he empathizes with Afghanistan war widows, the sense that the war's significance has been diminished is par for the course in U.S. history.
"It is not forgotten . It just has a smaller footprint than Iraq," he said. Similarly, he noted, the Korean War was considered the forgotten war, lost in the shadow of World War II.
"The geopolitical stakes in Afghanistan were much less than in Iraq, and a regrettable result of that is that U.S. troops killed there may have been overshadowed," Dupalo said. "The reaction of the loved ones is natural."
That is of little comfort to widows such as Griffith, whose husband died May 5.
"To care about this, the public has to want to hear about it . And from what I have seen, the public does not want to hear about Afghanistan," Griffith said. Large photos of John Griffith in uniform, their wedding photo and a wooden box containing his ashes are placed on her fireplace mantle.
"It should not matter where my husband died. It should only matter that he fought to help keep all of us free and that his family should be treated the same as all other families of those killed anywhere in the war."
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