Salon names SGTs Mora and Gray as their persons of the year.

I know a lot of folks on the right have their issue with Salon's coverage of the war. But I found this tribute to SGT Omar Mora and SGT Yance Gray to be really touching.

An excerpt:

It is, of course, impossible to note in a single article the stories of each of the 892 American men and women who died so far this year serving in Iraq, or of the 3,895 who have died since the war's inception or the 28,661 who have been wounded. But in the story of Mora and Gray, we are given a clear glimpse of what our soldiers died for. They did not just die for the mission, as prescribed to them by their superiors. "We need not talk about our morale," they wrote in the Times. "As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through."

They died in service to a country where even the soldier in the field has the right to question the judgment of the commander in chief. They died in service to the idea that political and military leaders must be held to account for their failures and challenged on their facts. A month after their article ran in the Times, the soldiers words echoed through the halls of Congress, when the war's Gen. David Petraeus and its chief diplomat, U.S. ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, came to testify.