Vic Socotra

13 November 2009

At Your Service

(Dismounted troops. Battery B, 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. US Army photo.)

I got a note from Kabul this morning. I cherish those communications, which strike me with awe at the miracles of technology that permit instantaneous communication across the time zones.

There was a time, not long ago, when this was unthinkable. When deployed, the kids who serve were out of touch as completely as if they had been shot to the moon.

One time I stood with a glass of champagne on my pal’s balcony in the 10th Arrondissment in Paris, and thought that life in uniform was a jolly thing indeed.

Now, hearing of the latest attack in Kabul, I opened the message with a nervous click of the mouse. Miracle of communications, we are still out of phase. My pal only has time to write at the end of an eighteen-hour day; mine is just beginning in the chill dark dawn, and the news is from the morning there in the land of the wild mountains and early snow.

There are kids from all over serving there, and  our Veterans Day- the ambiguous holiday that the government takes off and the working Vets do not- is celebrated as Remembrance Day.

My pal noted that “among our European Allies ... the main message remains the same across nearly a century, "They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old ..."

I feel old this morning. The holiday- if that is what it is- lies behind us now, and it is back to work for a couple weeks before we celebrate our thanks for the bounty of this life. They will overseas, too, though it will be a thinner commemoration, and another working day at war.

This generation of The Band of Brothers (and now full-fledged sisters) will stand with the others of whom much was asked, and who "answered all bells."

I was thanked by some in a disconcerting new ritual - "Thanks for your service," is the way the new greeting goes, and there are those who remember when such a routine honorific would frankly have been unthinkable. I do recall the last time I was cursed when I appeared in public in uniform; it only happened a couple times.

Once, at one of my sister's weddings, I was called a "baby killer" by some scruffy chump who, had he bothered to actually know anything about us, would have known that sailors rarely indulged in that sort of savagery.

In lovely San Francisco a little more than a decade ago I was walking along the piers on my way to a reception onboard HMCS Ottawa (FFH-341) when a bicyclist slowed briefly to deliver an obscene polemic on my role in the oppression of the developing world.

I invited his departing back to participate in the same improbable and possibly impossible contortion, and seethed quietly as I strode along toward a destination where people understood who I was, and what I did.

Anyway, you know can imagine how that feels, but it just went with the territory.

So it is odd to feel embarrassed by the acknowledgement of gratitude for what we did, since it feels to me that there is a vague recognition of the enormity of what we have asked this generation to do on our behalf.

Actually, discomfort is a better word, since in my slice of the Cold War we did not suffer the way they did, those who waded up out of the surf and marched to the Rhine.

We served with those who had been in Southeast Asia, and seen the elephant for themselves, but for years the nation paused before committing forces to the field, even if we watched from the sea.

We certainly were not thrust time and again into the maw of uncertainty and the terror of the roadside bomb with the innocuous name- as though improvisation somehow made the blinding rending roar less filled with stark terror and real red death.

Unlike Henry V's exhausted archers and dismounted knights, these words, much quoted when the nation periodically remembers its warriors, ring out:

From this day to the ending of the world,
    But we in it shall be remembered-
    We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
    For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
    Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
    This day shall gentle his condition;
    And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
    Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
    And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
    That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

That only one percent of our nation is under arms, that so few are in that band of bothers and sisters, may be a good thing for a nation that thinks peace is its right, and order the natural way of things.

It is not. At least not for the small part of this latest great generation.

I stand in awe of them, and thank them for being at our service, though that hardly seems enough.

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