Carmichael, Calif.
ON this Memorial Day, more than two years after the invasion of
Iraq, American troops are still fighting and dying. Their deaths have
become a staple of the evening news, a permanent column on the front
page. Most of the time, we don't even notice anymore. Until death
touches someone we know, or someone we used to be.
On the morning of Jan. 26, while I rush my daughters through their
bowls of cereal, brush their hair and get them ready for school, I
learn that a CH-53E Super Stallion helicopter has crashed in western
Iraq, killing 31 men. Twenty-six of them are part of my old unit:
Company C, First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment, stationed at Marine
Corps Base Hawaii, Kaneohe Bay.
Later, at work, I struggle to explain how surreal it is to learn
that marines from the infantry company I served with in the Persian
Gulf war have been killed in this one. I sit at my desk, processing
insurance claims, surrounded by gray cubicle walls instead of sandbags
and dirt, behind a computer instead of a machine gun, thinking about
the business card from the recruiter tucked in my wallet. He says
there's a slot for me in a reserve unit if I want it, and that I'd get
a chance to go overseas again, to be part of something larger and
greater than myself. To go to the war. I think about what my daughters
would say if I told them that I'm leaving, and that I might not come
back. I wonder how to justify it to myself if I don't go.
My co-worker looks over at me from his desk and says, "Did you know any of them?"
No, I didn't know them.
What I know is the base where they lived. The way they ran up K.T.,
Kansas Tower, this giant hill in the middle of the base, gasping all
the way to the top. I know the view from the apex, overlooking the
vivid blue of Kaneohe Bay, a rainbow in the background. I know how good
a cool breeze felt when they reached the top, after running past the
flight line, beyond the beach where their leg muscles burned and their
feet sank into soft, warm sand. I know what drives a marine, at the end
of his endurance, choking back vomit as the battalion runs in a huge
formation, to suddenly break ranks and run to the man carrying the
Colors, the battalion flag, and take it from him, sprinting around 800
marines in a giant circle before returning it and dropping back in
line. I know what they smelled like when they were sweating out the
beer they drank the night before.
But I didn't know them.
I know what they felt like when they were released on liberty at
1600 on a Friday afternoon. How much time it took to iron their clothes
and clean up for a night out. I know how many guys can be squeezed into
a subcompact car, piling on top of each other for a ride down to
Waikiki Beach and Kalakaua Avenue. I know what it's like to spend an
entire paycheck in 48 hours, buying drinks for impossibly beautiful
women from all over the world who all seem to be in the same bar on the
same night.
I know the feeling of being thousands of miles from home, afraid
because war is coming soon, and then a girl smiles and, for a moment,
everything is O.K. I know how a woman like that can make the toughest
marine feel 16 again, kissing a girl for the first time. I know how to
get all the way across the island back to the base from Waikiki, or
Honolulu, with no money and only the other guys in my platoon to help
me. I know what it is to become brothers with men you never would have
met in the civilian world, and to remember them for years after they're
gone.
But I didn't know them.
I know what it feels like to patrol for days without sleep in
Molokai, and at Schofield Barracks and Camp Pendleton; in Okinawa, and
the Philippines and Saudi Arabia. I know the industrial claustrophobia
of being on a ship, packed in with 40 other marines in a space the size
of a studio apartment. The smells, the jokes, the way the surface of
the helicopter flight deck cuts into your palms when you do push-ups. I
know what it's like to comfort marines when their wives or girlfriends
leave them with only a note and a bogus explanation and they want
answers, but there aren't any.
But I didn't know them.
I know what it's like to ride in a CH-53 helicopter. The way it
shimmies as it thunders over the terrain below, a crouched panther
waiting to strike, marines in the back, heads bowed, trying to catch
some sleep, never knowing when they might get another chance to rest.
Marines dreaming of their families, of home.
No, I didn't know the marines who died, but I miss them just the
same. I go to work each day, safe in my cubicle, checking the news for
word of the war dead, looking for friends and thinking about that
recruiter's card in my wallet.
Kevin C. Jones served as a marine from 1990 to 1994.
of my Christmas.
brought over his gf of four months and 
I mean it's cool on the actual holiday and maybe even the day after to
finish 'em off but fireworks were going off last night. Are we
celebrating
.
The day shouldn't be awful. Unfortunately a couple million other people
are thinking the same thing--so it'll be a challenge to see how best to
pull this off.
But I have a ton that may be collectible and I have to "chase down"
info on them (they are not catagorized in a modern way using the
traditional ISBN number that came to be in the US in 1974).
Otherwise, I'll try to snap a few pics and throw them up on
eBay--maybe--I'm kinda burned out on eBay and deeply curious what
Google has up it's sleeve to counter-it in the near future.
