Compare and Contrast

This story:

A man who lost a son to the war in Afghanistan is disappointed in the condolence letter he received from President Barack Obama.

Tom Logan, a Willis resident, calls the note late, impersonal, disrespectful and essentially a form letter.

“It opened up a wound in our heart you can’t fix. You can’t send another letter. You can’t make it right,” Logan said.

Logan’s son, USMC Cpl. Joseph D. Logan, was killed Jan. 19, 2012, along with five other men when the helicopter they were in crashed.

Joey Logan was 22.

“He would have been more mad about this than I am,” Tom Logan said.

Tom Logan said he believes Obama did little more than sign his name to the document. He believes his son deserved more.

Local 2 Investigates examined two other letters sent by Obama to families of soldiers killed in action. The one-page typed condolence letters were identical other than names, ranks and service branches.

With this story:

Jane Horton began crying on the other end of the phone when she learned that Mitt Romney had been using the story of her husband, Chris Horton, who was killed in Afghanistan, as a part of his stump speech.
"Wow," the 26-year-old said. "I had no idea.

"To be honest, I've been through a lot and I'm not a super emotional person but it brings me to tears," Horton said in an interview with ABC News, after being informed of her husband's newfound spot on the national stage. "Not that he's telling my story, but that he's telling my husband's story, it means the world to me.

"One of the last things my husband said to me before he was killed, when I would ask him, 'Chris, what do you need over there? What can I send you?' he said, 'I need a new president,'" Horton recalled....

They first spoke when Romney wrote her a handwritten letter after Chris was killed. It was Oct. 1, 2011, Horton said, re-reading the letter as she spoke, remembering that she was shocked Romney had put two and two together -- that one of his many staffers had been killed and he'd figured out a way to find his wife.

A few months later, Horton still touched by Romney's outreach and thinking about her husband's support of the candidate, decided to send the candidate his name tape -- the part of a soldier's uniform that displays his last name.

Horton received another handwritten note from Romney thanking her, and communication dropped off between them until August 2012, when Horton decided to ask the campaign if she could meet him when she went to the Republican National Convention where she'd be acting as an Oklahoma delegate.

"I didn't want to meet him because he could be the next president, I wanted to meet him to thank him for all of his time, all the time he took to care about me and hand write me twice," Horton explained.

And they did meet -- the morning after Romney's speech at the RNC, just before a rally in Lakeland, Fla., when staff members organized for her to climb aboard his campaign bus.

  Two very different stories, two very different men.