WASHINGTON — With the death toll of Americans in Iraq at 4,000, the war continues to move further away from the public eye with other topics and the presidential campaigns taking the lead.

On a mild March day in Washington, locals and visitors toured the capital’s war memorials and reflected on lives lost in Iraq, the media and how it affects their lives. There’s compassion and reverence, but also doubt and fear among teens, who barely remember life without war, and veterans with vivid memories.

David Rhoades, 51, a retired Navy chief petty officer, combs through media stories daily to present news and images of the war in Iraq to students in his Navy JROTC (Junior Reserve Officers Training) class at Eau Claire High School in Columbia, S.C. It’s a challenge, he says, to weed out the politics and opinion pieces. He’s looking for straight news.

“I want them to make up their own minds [about the war],” he said while leading 40 students on a class trip through the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Korean War Veterans Memorial.

At the beginning of the school year many students couldn’t find Iraq on a map, he said. Now they discuss the war and remind each other to show respect at the somber D.C. landmarks.

But this generation of teens has a different war experience than he did growing up during the Vietnam era, said Rhoades.

“There’s no draft. They feel like [the war] is not going to affect them,” he said. As a teen he worried about which of his older friends would be sent to Vietnam. “It saddens me because they don’t take it as seriously as [we] used to. Unless someone directly in their family is going, other than that, it’s of no concern.”

But his students spoke up for their generation.

“The war is scary,” said Amanda Rice, a 17-year-old junior in the JROTC program. “The death toll is scary, and how many people don’t come home, and how many people have to keep going back.”

Media coverage has waned from saturation to hardly any, she said.

“I want to see what’s going on over there, not just what people think about,” Rice said.

Her classmate Ashleigh Scott said she’s lost her unfaltering confidence that the U.S. will win the war.

“I still don’t see the main reason we are fighting. I just see excuses,” Scott said.

Robert Bridges, a 92-year-old World War II veteran from nearby Silver Spring, Md., sat near the fountains of the WWII Memorial and attracted attention with his decorated veterans ball cap.

Grace Zoller, 16, visiting from Kansas City, Mo., approached him and thanked him for his service. Her uncle recently returned to Kansas City after more than a year in Iraq. She talked about her uncle, and Bridges talked about the hijinks he and his buddies got away with in Italy.

“I just don’t like that we’re over there,” Bridges said of today’s war. “But we’re over there so you got to back ’em. They’re Americans.”

Bridges follows the war closely and meets regularly with other veterans at his American Legion post and VFW hall. He said he’d like to see more personal stories about the troops in the media. Grace agreed.

“It’s more about what the candidates think than what happened today and what needs to be done,” she said. Her uncle told her Iraqi women and children would hug and thank him for his service. “We never see that.”

Sitting in a booth selling military patches and pins, Army veteran David Sawyer, 57, meets plenty of people who want to share their stories. His booth is a can’t-miss on a sidewalk that connects the Vietnam Wall to the Korean War Memorial in the shadows of the Lincoln Memorial.

Active-duty military buy pins to take to their friends. Weeping parents buy patches to honor their dead children, he said.

“Every day there’s some kind of death: a car accident, a roadside bomb, a sniper,” he said. Since the first Gulf War it doesn’t seem like much has changed, he said.

“We haven’t accomplished a lot, but we have losses every day.”

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