A Moment of Pride and Reflection

Beneath my lighthearted pretense, the stuff I write here usually matters to me a great deal.  Ordinarily, I don't feel any pressing need to whack folks on the head.  Well, maybe that piece on the Gulf oil got away from me.  Get over it.

But this one matters to me a great deal.  Next month, my son comes home from Kuwait, where he has given a year of his life - this time - to supporting the war in Iraq.  Last time was in Iraq itself, the time before that and before that and before that, in South Korea supporting a 60-year-old truce.  He wears more ribbons than the Maypole at Miss Porter's School.

Erik will come to Fort Sill in Oklahoma as part of an advance team to welcome home the rest of his unit, some of whom hail from Connecticut as he does, and some of whom hail from right here in Clearwater.  Small world, this.  His duties will include teaching soldiers who have been at war how to return to a society that does not always speak in the same gerunds that the soldiers do.  Good idea, that.

I'm somewhat accustomed to Erik's homecomings, so why the hoo-hah now?

I had occasion yesterday to view a Facebook entry from Erik's friend, Jay, also known as Charles M. Beyer, Captain, Connecticut Army National Guard.  Jay climbs into the pilot's seat of a helicopter every day and flies over some of the most deadly real estate on Earth.

When Jay lands safely back in Kuwait, he is also Erik's CO.  (Blackhawk photo credit: David J. Mercado, Clearwater FL & Kuwait City)

Jay did some training in Germany earlier this month and, on the 66th anniversary of D-Day, took pictures at the concentration camp at Dachau.  Here's one he took of the "shower facility" that still stands as a reminder of what can happen when good people don't act.

Erik's grandfather, nearly 90, is Bill Flaherty, featured here.  Pop rarely speaks of it, and he'll be a little embarrassed if he reads it here, but he spent his years in the army slogging through the Ardennes and the Battle of the Bulge, pushing into Germany in 1945 to bring an end to the nightmare that was Nazism.

The way I see it, fanaticism - whether ideological like the Nazis, religious like Al Qaida and the Taliban, or dictatorial like Kim Jong-Il  - is a present and continuing threat to us all.  Only dedicated effort by Jay and Erik and their peers in uniform can prevent another Dachau or 9/11.  Freedom is no more free today that it was 66 years ago.

So this homecoming will again be one of joy, tempered with admiration for the world's most important job, done well.  Thank you, Erik and Jay and all who have served with you.  Welcome home.

We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Newt

Return to Amarillo

With SSGT Erik on his circuitous way to sunny, sandy Kuwait, I thought you might enjoy the following video created in Iraq by Brits, whose government has since had the good sense to bring them home. This is not as entertaining as Erik in his pink feather boa, but it will have to do. Crank up the speakers.

Newt

An Army of One

Light-hearted blogging gets harder to do when your number-one son is putting on his fatigues and flying to some God-forsaken desert region, peopled by heathens who think we are heathens and who abjure drinking beer. And that's just Oklahoma, where Erik is going for pre-Kuwait training next Tuesday. The "Army Way" - which routinely calls for training in Alaska prior to desert deployment - is on the fritz again this month. He ships out a couple months later.

While he is in Kuwait, Erik and his helicopter unit are going to - Christ, I hope this isn't classified - they're going to chauffeur important folks from place to place so they can see in the first person what evil is befalling the oppressed people of the region. They also will look to see what's befalling the Iraqis. By this I mean no criticism of the war itself or the Iraqis, although the war is imminently deserving of the criticism it gets from every other blog on the planet, except perhaps Dick Cheney's, and the Iraqis can get under your skin, as well. I do realize that important people need to be chauffeured. I would prefer my son not be doing the chauffeuring.

But that is what Erik does. Well, actually, he makes good helicopters out of bad helicopters so other soldiers can do the hands-on chauffeuring. It's what he signed up to do 16 or so years ago, he's good at it (or so he tells us), and I am intensely proud of him. Of course, I would be just as intensely proud of him if he were home out of harm's way.

Apart from oil - and I'm not getting into that - Kuwait's greatest natural resources are royalty, money, and sand. You could check Wikipedia. Erik is unlikely to run into much royalty, who prefer their own chauffeurs, and God knows sergeants do not see much money (Erik has already earmarked his war-zone pay for the mother of all cars). The soldiers do however get intimate with the sand. Kuwait has too much sand. In fact, in 2008 alone, the Army shipped 6,700 tons of sand from Kuwait to Idaho, which apparently is running low on sand. The good news is that the sand was a gift from Kuwaiti royalty. The bad news - at least for Idahoans - is that the sand is lightly laced with depleted uranium from a prior war. What's left over in Kuwait is exceedingly fine, it contaminates everything it touches, and it touches everything. My grandson Kellan is like that as well. But I am wandering here.

War has been described as endless days of soul-destroying boredom, interspersed with moments of sheer terror. As a parent, I don't care much about the boredom part; it's that other part that makes me breathe erratically. Hopefully, the greatest terror that Erik will see is that which flows from being in a state where beer is so hard to come by. Oklahoma, I mean.

Erik, keep the sand out of your socks, your shorts and your lungs. Do what you need to do and come back safely.

Love,

Dad