11 September 2003

The retired admiral from Naperville asked us to wear whites for the dedication of the monument to the dead. I'm fully and finally retired, I said, and Mark is just about offical, too. He said it was appropriate and fitting and it was completely appropriate. He had been retired for eighteen years and he was going in uniform. So we to scramble a bit to find all the various bits and pieces. I found my hat with the cool scrambled eggs on the visor in the back of the closet . It looked dishevelled and I discovered that the elastic in the band that holds the officer crest in place had given up the ghost. No spring left in it. The crest with the eagle grasping the silver sheild and the brass anchors crossed behind hung limply forward.

The combination cover was white enough, and if the gold chin-strap was a little tarnished, so be it. But with the crest hanging like that it looked positively forlorn. I fussed with it, gathering the back up in a couple folds that I secured with a bobby pin. Good to go. I did not try on the whites- it was late in the season but summer whites were still the uniform-of-the-day. I just hoped that they would not fit too badly and be embarrassing.

Mark and I rendezvoused at National Airport, down by the gate. We had a bite to eat- there was plenty of time since we have to be in place to damned early these days- and we had a couple beers before boarding. There were two ways to approach the day and we decided that the "road trip" theme was the way our friend Dan would have preferred it. He would probably have been having a beer with us if those bastards had not murdered him and the others two years ago this day.

The flight out of Washington was jam-packed, surprising for the anniversary. Maybe it was because the airlines had cut back on the number of flights scheduled for the day. But when we got to O'Hare it was teeming with people too. Go figure.

We took the bus to the rent-a-wreck place and on a whim, Mark upgraded us to a Sebring Convertible. Great car to drive on a momentous occasion, though I must say the trucks on I-90 to I-294 to I-88 west make things a bit colorful. The weather was not as nice as it had been on The Day, but it was lovely nonetheless.

Naperville is about thirty minutes from the airport. Far enough to have retained some character of its own, though the Hilton we stayed at was oriented toward the high-tech campus environments built on what used to be pastures. We had a beer in the bar, chatted with the bartender who was a retired Air Force E-5. I didn't know you could do that, make twenty years and get only as far as Staff Sergeant, but he said he spent most of his time attached to the Air Guard right here in the local area. I suppose you don't have to deploy to serve, and he had done his time honorably. "God Speed," we said, when we went to get into our uniforms. I got mine on, though I felt like one of those white German sausages once I got everything buttoned up.

We did not get a real flavor for where we were until the gleaming glass and steel complexes we sinking in the rear-view mirror. We looked great in our shoulder boards with the four fat gold stripes and festooned with ribbons and badges. We were top-down and glad to be. The convertible was the right thing to do. We didn't get a sense of the place until we passed under the Interstate and began to enter the town proper. It was deja vu all over again. Little bungalows. Quiet streets. Dan''s Mom says there is now a diversity in the community that was not true when Dan was growing up and he complained in his journals about the sameness of the whitebread population.

But coming as we do from the riot of diversity in DC, this was pleasant. Calming, in fact. Just an American town filled with clean-cut people doing clean-cut American things. We wheeled through the residential neighborhoods with the tree-shaded homes and the big porches and the kids and dogs just before four in the afternoon. We made our way to the municipal parking garage which is adjacent to the River Walk. We had been warned that security would be tight. You know what that means here. Grim faced folks in uniform. The machine guns at the ready the way they were after the attacks. Now we are used to the ubiquitous process of emptying our pockets and removing our shoes and being bombarded with electrons as the cost of entering a building.

This security was some beefy young men in jumpsuits that were friendly. They waved us in and Mark parked us a couple rows away from the door which led to part of the city building. This was human scale, not heroic the way things are constructed back in the District. This place was made to be of service, not to awe or intimidate. Naperville seemed to be like that. A nice place to be.

There was a buffet set up for the VIP guests, of which number we found ourselves counted. That is where I talked to Fireman Mike and had his astonishing story of bravery and heroism spill out over the meatballs. We met Dan's folks and his family and a bevy of Naperville's leading citizens, all of them courteous and friendly. I felt a genuine sense of community that I have not felt in a long, long time. There were a fair amount of white uniforms present. The Director of Naval Intelligence and his small entourage were there- he looked great. Quiet, strong and dignified. He had stood tall at all the funerals, treating this as a family matter. He had come in the day before and had dinner with Dan's parents the night before. He had addressed the Rotary at eleven that morning.

I marveled at that. My Dad is a Rotarian, too, and they meet Monday mornings up in Petoskey. It is a way to get organized for the week and you can see everyone who counts all in one place. There was a guy in a ball cap that someone pointed out to me. He had been on the 105th floor of Tower Two when the plane hit. He had not taken the elevator, walked down with three other people. There had been forty or so at the meeting he attended and the ones who took elevators to the lobby never got there. He was going to be one of the speakers, along with the Mayor and Dan's Mom and the Admiral. The crowd was growing outside, almost everyone wanting to be part of the ceremony.

There were some local Navy reservists, not Intel guys, but we joined forces with them and we all looked the same. The civilians couldn't tell who was from out of town and we actually had quite a presence. I think there might have been fourteen or so. Mark and I did not have speaking parts and I looked forward to sitting in a folding chair for the program. We were asked to be part of the detail, though, and we agreed immediately.

What they wanted us to do was to stand behind a waist-high wall at a regular interval, and on command, hoist up a black tarpaulin that covered the other side facing the sculpture. Concealed beneath it were dozens of faces cast from designs drawn by the Naperville grade- school kids to depict the victims of the attacks. Relatives of the dead from New York would pull down the shroud from the monument itself.

As the appointed minute came, we filed out with the other VIPs to take our place. There was some genial confusion as we found our places and got ourselves sorted out. There was a retired Marine Gunnery Sergeant who was in his Blues, and he was the real deal, stouter perhaps, than he had been on active duty, but a Devil-dog with a parade ground voice that brought back the sweltering days on the grinder at Pensacola. Anyone who has had their own Gunny knows what I mean and what the sound of that voice can do to you.

There was the Naperville Band and the Naperville men's chorus and they sang a medley of patriotic songs to start the ceremony. I had assumed a parade rest position, not knowing any other way to not fidget with my hands, and I saw from the corner of my eyes that we had actually presented a unified formation. The problem was that there seems to be more of me than there was thirty years ago and having my hands back there put some interesting stress on my shoulders and I didn't know how long I would be able to hold it. The knee the Navy quacks say must be replaced began to lock up on me almost immediately. But parade rest was the command, and parade rest it was.

The chorus started out with America the Beautiful and moved on to the Battle Hymn of the Republic. In the least emotional of times the Hymn has the capability of sneaking up on me and getting me misty.

Today was too much. It all came back in a rush. I tried to keep my eyes up, away from the circle of Dan's family and the Honored Guests and the boosters and the Monument Committee arranged concentricly around the black shrouded monument. I tried to keep my gaze over the hundreds of people who lined this side of the placid river, and above the hundreds who lined the other shore of the river walk. There were flags everywhere, big ones and small ones, and everyone was singing together and the music swelled. I thought of the long line of those who who had served that banner, all who had seen the glory of it and those who died for it and who rested beneath it.

I tried to concentrate on the soft golden light and the magic dancing of the leaves and I realized I couldn't. The tears rolled down my cheeks and dripped off my chin and onto my chest. I did not wipe them away. I couldn't. We had not been told to move, or placed at ease to get out a hankerchief. We were in formation. Because we were at parade rest.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra