The forty pounds of Kevlar body armor pulling on my neck and shoulders will do little good...
The forty pounds of Kevlar body armor pulling on my neck and shoulders will do little good...
“You’ve been in a bad mood for the last two days,“ wife Annette said. “It’s because of your Dad’s birthday and your brother’s birthday.” Dad-August 1. David August 2. Dad gone now ten years. David a year and a half.
“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” I snarled back.
I think it has far more to do with summer waning. Fall approaching. Winter coming on.
It’s late August and with my 69th birthday coming up in seven weeks, the summer of my life is long gone. It’s late in fall and winter approaching. Summer ended the day I retired from the Army National Guard. I miss it. I’ve found nothing to replace it.
It was a huge part of my life. The business of running for Congress filled the void. The constant demands of serving in Congress and running for re-election sucked up every moment for the first two and a half years after retiring from the Guard. As I left Congress, big-time, private jet ferried, plaintiff’s lawyers recruited me to sign up farmers for the billions of dollar lawsuit against Syngenta for its bungled launch of genetically modified corn seed, Viptera. A year and a half later, with contracts representing a million and a half corn acres in hand, once again the spectre of what to do gaped open.
I thought I’d filled the black hole. I enjoy my life but I sure miss the demands of the Guard. Adrenaline junkie is the label Annette pins on me and the ones like me.
Before light, pulling on the army combat uniform, dog tags around the neck, encased in plastic so they make no sound, two of them. One to be left with the body for identification later, one to be taken to show a casualty left behind. Boots laced. Double check cavernous pockets. Keys. Two phones. Wallet. Handkerchief. Pens. Money clip. List of casualties.
Oh yeah, that typewritten list with the names, ranks, date of death of the thirty-four soldiers and airmen of the Illinois National Guard lost in the neverending war. Always in upper left pocket. Sheathed in plastic so the ink doesn’t run. So the paper doesn’t deteriorate when the uniform gets wet. Sweat, rain, blood. Uniforms get wet.
I can see their smiling faces. The photos that get played at every memorial service. Every Gold Star ceremony, where the families come together to have the scabs of grief ripped open again.
Sitting here in my green-leaf shrouded writing room, I miss the tension of the darkened C-130 tracing the Iranian border north towards Afghanistan. Iranian radar pinging. Guns trained on the lumbering Herky. Strain in the pilot’s voice as he queries the navigator, “Nav, got our location?”
The forty pounds of Kevlar body armor pulling on my neck and shoulders will do little good if the Iranians pull the trigger and the antiaircraft missiles scream off the launchers poised and pointed in our direction.
The thin-skinned, four-engined, propeller driven relic of Viet Nam, with its cargo of eighty or so trooper dozing, strapped in to canvas seats bolted to sidewalls, chins leaning on rifles, M-4, butt down on the vibrating aluminum floor. Ear plugs failing to keep out the body beating noise of the four Allison turbo prop engines pulsing through the stark metal cocoon as their forty-three hundred horses pull us through the night skies.
The nodding troopers, fitfully dozing, as soldiers always do when on their way to an uncertain destination and unknown future, completely unaware death lies a few seconds away. Death held off only by the skill of the navigator and pilot keeping us seconds away from Iranian air space. Two miles into Pakistan. Ten thousand feet from Iran. Let’s see, the Herky is probably doing 250 miles per hour. Maybe 260. How long does it take to invade Iranian air space? How long then for the loaded, aimed, cocked, explosive tipped missile to reach the Great Satan’s warplane? Detonate. Shards of aluminum, bits of bodies and unknowing souls plunging into foreign soil.
I give up on the calculation and return to watching the stars, for there is no light below.