Yesterday was the day to memorialize Americans who paid the ultimate sacrifice. Today I find myself wanting to explore who the better soldiers are, the bullet takers or the bullet avoiders. It is a great thing to know, of the cadre of people who I have known to have worn the uniform and slapped finger to trigger, dealt with months and years of preparation for the big day, only one person I ever shook hands with paid the ticket price for American freedom.
Maybe back before modern wars fought with American bodies yielded so few deaths this question was more prevalent, but I have always wondered, do the best survive war or do the lucky.
I served in the Army during the Clinton peace years. I am proud of my service, but really the hardest thing I did was change tires, not get lost on land navigation courses and avoid being shot or shooting anyone else when I was in possession of live ammunition. In my military career I drove five ton trucks every day, I threw one grenade in basic training and hated the experience, I envisioned it exploding the minute I pulled the pin and the thought has never left me. I once fired a round inches from my squad leaders head on the first range I went to when I got stationed at Fort Campbell and later before being discharged I was almost shot in the head by a private on a live fire range, who later dies in action serving in Iraq. If it was not for him, I could probably view my military service as an adult version of the boy scouts.
Of course I have known, met and have seen with my own eyes other types of war casualties. There are people, like my dad, who went to war and came home different, never to be who they were before combat, emotionally missing and as is the case with my good ole Pa, physically missing as well, but otherwise for the most part they are living, others come home members of the walking dead, never to enjoy that for which they fought and live their lives out of shopping carts, dirty, with society cringing at the sight of them.
Emotional or physical scars, the youth that was, is gone forever, used to pay the price of a political decision many who fought will probably never fully understand.
The private who almost shot me on a live fire range was a sweet guy; he gave his life not to save his buddies, but to avoid hitting a car driven by a crazed Iraqi driver. He was posthumously awarded the rank of sergeant and given a bronze star, fifth highest combat award, probably earned for the meritorious act of falling on the proverbial grenade for the Iraqis in the car he avoided crushing like a tin can under the wheels of his five-ton.
He might have earned it for something else, but It’s nice to think that the people in that car he saved, people most likely thought to be potential suicide bombers at the time of the accident, could have changed things for many people had they been killed by this high charging 88M in full mission mode. Maybe he prevented the making of actual suicide bombers by keeping alive some persons parent, spouse, child or other family member and friend. Maybe this one G.I. saved hundreds of others by swerving to avoid people he had most likely been given permission to run off the road if they got in his way.
Pure speculation.
We will never know.
This was a guy, I imagine, who was not given the responsibility of the first in his convoy that day, unless a lot changed from when I knew him.
When I heard he died my first thought was what the fuck was he even doing over there? The image that came to mind was of a man, head tilted, full smirk and thought empty eyes of a village idiot. He would be the butt of jokes. But even I was the butt of jokes. We all were the butt of jokes. Fat, skinny, weak, stupid, nerdy, drunk, everyone had a negative attached to his or their name.
He was my partner on many a training, on a night of land navigation by truck he couldn’t read the topographical map yet, at that point in his Army career, so I did all the “intellectual” work. I knew by nearly having my brains blown out that he hadn’t learned to safety his weapon yet. In the first seven months of his enlistment he got a lot of shit from everyone in the platoon, but he took it, took it with that crooked smile and empty eyes.
I never did learn who he really was.
Now he is a hero forever. Whatever he did in his life, whether he dropped out of high school, or got a PhD, bullied the weak, or stood face to face with the strongest of villains, he is now the highest rank a citizen of the United States can achieve, hero. He gets his own holiday, along with all the other fallen war heroes in history U.S. war and his mistakes are washed away. In fact he will be made better, promoted and awarded, roads will be named after him, and schools, perhaps even scholarships awarded all because he sacrificed himself for a cause decided upon for him by politicians amassed in the Capitol building.
He is polished and will shine on for eternity.
So to answer the question, do the best survive war or do the lucky, it would seem neither, the best and the lucky die in conflict, they die doing what they signed up to do. Whether its catching bullets or flipping trucks, falling from the sky or feeding sharks, they don’t live the rest of their lives regretting or rethinking, or reliving daily the failing their brothers. They don’t take drugs to remove the weight from their memories, they don’t walk away from their families, or anger easily and beat their wives, or become drug addicts, or drink too much, or horde money, women and lies.
My training buddy is gone.
he is a saint now, wings, halo to match.
His platoon mates and anyone who served with him will forever feel bad for any negative thing they thought about the man.
I do.
I don’t think of him as the brightest bulb on the tree. When I tell people about him, I preface the statement of his death with this opinion; he was a dumb mother fucker who should have never gone to war in the first place.
I believe that. Like others in our platoon think the things they thought about me and I think the shit I thought about others. If any of us were to have died in conflict we would feel bad the rest of our lives that the opinion we had for another soldier was/is so negative.
The men and women of his platoon, who laughed at him behind his back and to his face, probably all survived. They came home and out of the people they shared daily formations with this one guy who died when his truck flipped over in a crazy war in which the American people, no, the people of the world, were lied to so it could be fought, will be remembered. His simple smile, like the plunger on a claymore mine when thought of, will depress and flood the brain with the guilt of having never fully understood the guy who died.
He is the lucky one.
All his regrets are gone.
His war is over and the soldiers he left behind will go on fighting their personal battles for the rest of their lives.
Whether they were the best going into battle, or whether they fought with the highest of skills, at the end of the day, draped with the American flag, they forever will be known as the best The United States had to offer leaving behind a slew of brothers and sisters to languish in having not sacrificed fully for their families back home and allowing another to do so in their place.
