Remembering War

Fifty years ago, I sat watching a black and white TV screen of wounded soldiers being loaded upon a helicopter in Vietnam. The ducking soldiers during fire fights and the corpse of dead Vietcong laying around burning villages and wondering what it would be like to be there. Five years later I found myself stepping off a bus into a dimly lit Army basic training reception station at Fort Lewis, Washington, this seventeen year old kid was about to become a man. It was a time of the draft and there were men who didn’t want to be where they were and the fear of the unknown. The next eight weeks would bring out the best of each man and as we all sat in a large assembly hall, waiting for our orders for our next school, my name wasn’t called. As I sat there and wondered why, an officer sat next to me and advised me, my school had cancelled and I had an option; choose a different school or go home to the Army reserves; I chose the latter.

The reserves didn’t fulfill my hopes and dreams and I found myself dreaming of active duty. Why didn’t I choose active duty when I had the chance; I was seventeen and there were thoughts of the teenage things I still wanted to do. The Vietnam War was over and the image of the military was one of disgrace. Who would choose a life in uniform; I did. Through the Cold War years of patrolling along the Eastern European border, watching them as they watched us. The cold winds of the North, blowing across the border of North and South Korea as we watched them watching us. We trained with worn and broken equipment through the years, preparing for battles which never came. The wall fell and there wasn’t as severe of threat in Europe as it had been but we were still watching the border of Korea.

There would be limited military actions, saving students on a tropical island, supporting the UK during their Falkland’s engagement and then the Middle East erupts in 1990. As we prepared for war, the dream of going into combat was about to become real. It had taken almost twenty years before my dream was to come to pass and when it happened, the dream was not one I will ever forget. Sleeplessness, fear, boredom and then action, only to be followed with sleeplessness, fear and boredom. Then the final battles, with the sights, sounds and the smell of death, which still resonates with me today. It’s been twenty-five years since I’ve been to war. As I sit and watch the color, high definition TV images of battles still raging in the Middle East and the corpse of Isis soldiers, it all comes back to me as it did, fifty years ago, the calling of the guns and war.

Veterans Day is the one day a year, I meet with many of my brothers and sisters of arms. We laugh, hug, shed tears and remember the days, long past but still burned into our memories. If you haven’t been there, it’s difficult for you to understand, we are family. Spend some time this Veterans Day and remember this, we were there for you so you didn’t have to experience what we experienced.