Vic Socotra

02 August 2009

Home

(Grave of Brigadier John Nicholson, Indian Army, Delhi)

Home is where you chose to be, at the end of the long day, and they say that is the place where they cannot refuse to take you in.

Scott Speicher is home, via Dover Air Force Base, after a very long time away.

I remember when he disappeared, on the first night of the first Gulf War in which America Chose to fight. Scott was driving a sleek F/A-18 Hornet toward the Iraqi Air Defense network one moment and then he was not.

He had been missing for eighteen years. Now he is home.

Scott’s long saga is worth a story of its own here. A Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency I worked for spent, by his account, more than half his time answering questions and demands from Congress about Scott’s status, which bounced from KIA to MIA to DUSTWUN to POW and back again, after years of searches and inquiries, to just missing.

I had a young Special Forces Major who worked or me in the Pentagon in the years between the wars, and he had personally stood on the spine of that broken Hornet in the desert we did not own. He had been dispatched on a clandestine mission to find the truth.

Scott was a handsome young man, and as dashing a Naval Aviator as you could expect to meet. His remains were found in a shallow grave in the desert not far from the site of the crash a few weeks ago, and forwarded with military honors back to the lab at Dover for the forensic examination along with the more recently killed heroes.

His identity was confirmed. Tonight, Scott Speicher is home.

Rest in Peace, brave warrior. Your country did not forget your sacrifice, though you are fortunate the years were not as long as they will be.

News of his repatriation brought back some profound memories, of frantic point paper-writing and official cars heading for the Hill, and of graves far away.

I happened to be in Delhi a few years ago, and the length of the flight qualified under the Joint Travel Regulations for a day of recuperation on arrival. I knew the chances of getting back anytime soon were about nil, and determined to have a bit of an adventure before the business of the delegation commenced.

Some of us decided to embark on a bus to Agra, to see the magnificent Taj. I hired a car and headed north, through old Delhi, to the Civil Lines District.

There were several places I wanted to see and experience, and they did not fail to fill me with the sort of wonder that Shelley described in his sonnet “Ozymandius:”

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

This little snippet is about all that is remembered in the popular mind of Shelley’s life’s work. I imagine he would have been discomfited the poet, but I think he would understand.

That was the feeling that seized me at the base of the great obelisk at Coronation Park off the Bhai Parmanand Marg near Radio Colony that marks the site of the three great Durbars held after the brutal suppression of the great Mutiny in 1859.

It was suitably desolate. I hear the Indian government is going to spruce it up, for tourism and general-use purposes, but a the moment, confronting the mission of the delegation that brought me, it suited me just fine.

Coming back through the Civil Lines District, I asked to stop at the Nicholson Cemetery, where Brigadier Nicholson himself if buried.

Nicholson was the great hero of the Mutiny, at least from the side of the aj, and he was mortally wounded in the moment of his greatest triumph.

The cemetery was in tough shape, just as the Conoration Durbar grounds were. In addition to the General, thousands of Colonials lay at rest on the grounds around, and the inscriptions on the Victorian headstones were touching and sad.

Of all the evocative stones in the overgrown yard, Nicholson’s has an iron fence around it, and is fairly clean. They say it is a ritual of some of the freshman students in Delhi to go to the cemetery and spit on the grave.

I don’t know. Driving away, ensconced in the back of the car and into the chaos of new Delhi, all I could think was that an angrier new nation would have razed the remnants of the oppressor, and the Indians did not.

It was nice to be American, I thought, and not have the monuments of empire for others to spit on.

Or at least that is what I thought until last week. I heard that the Master Chief had died, and where he chose to call home at the end. What was really peculiar was that he ended up with the Sergeant Major, and I will have to get to that tomorrow.

I have to go feed the feral cats at my own memorial to a dream.

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