What a man looks like
January 25, 2012 by Billy Coffey · Leave a Comment
image courtesy of snopes.com
The picture you see to your right is of a man named John Gebhardt, a Chief Master Sergeant who was assigned to the 332nd Expeditionary Medical Group at Balad Air Base in Iraq. The child he’s holding is a girl whose entire family was executed by insurgents. She survived despite the gunshot wound to her head.
The picture was taken in October 2006. Chances are you’ve seen it and know the story of how that little girl wouldn’t stop crying and moaning unless Chief Gebhardt held her. So that’s what he did every night in that chair, he recovering from another day of war, she recovering from a horror she likely always be shackled to.
I could go a lot of places with this story. I could talk about the fact that Chief Gebhardt is back home in Kansas now and that the little girl (whose name he never knew) was eventually released to a surviving family member. I could talk about the cruelty of war and the darkness of the world. I won’t. I’m sure you know all about such things.
The website where I rediscovered this picture offered only the picture and the bare bones of the circumstances surrounding it, followed beneath by hundreds of comments. I will say I tend to skip over comments when it comes to news stories. They tend to quickly devolve into politics and meanness, both of which are things I see enough of every day. I don’t have the heart to go in search of more. But my eyes drifted nonetheless, and though what I found didn’t surprise me, it did offer me a chance to ponder.
The vast majority of the comments were from women, many of whom professed a deep admiration for the Chief’s actions and offered thoughts or prayers (or both) for the girl. What political commentary was offered leaned toward the fact that while we may disagree with the wars our country has fought, we should all agree on the fact that our soldiers deserve our praise.
But what caught my eye was that despite all of these hundreds of voices and the different lives they each must live, nearly all of them shared a common sentiment:
This is what a man looks like.
It seemed almost sad that so many were led to offer such a reminder. It was even sadder to know that such a reminder was needed. Blame the culture, blame Homer Simpson, blame the government, blame whatever—the truth is that somewhere along the way males forgot how to be men. And though our national ills can be traced back to a great many things, I have no problem saying that the fall of men has something to do with it.
We live in a country of fathers who are not dads and spouses who are not husbands, where honor has been replaced by X-Boxes it’s not only acceptable to act like a boy, it’s cool.
That’s why we need people like Chief Master Sergeant Gebhardt. To show us that a real man has the capacity to fight and to love. He will risk his life to defend the oppressed, and he will comfort the brokenhearted. That he will believe in the goodness that lies within us all but know that darkness lies there as well.
Ricky’s scars
May 4, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 14 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
Even today Ricky is wearing long sleeves, though these are the three-quarter kind that end just before his wrists. It’s hot—the thermometer on the bank flashes 85 between the time and the interest rates. Very hot for early May in Virginia. And I can tell Ricky’s feeling it. Sweat has gathered on back of his shirt, turning it a darker gray. I see it and think of a Rorschach test. I see a dragon breathing fire. I wonder what Ricky would say if he could see it.
He turns as I pull on the door and tips his beer to me. As he does, I can see the jagged scars in his arms, twisting like dry riverbeds in a forgotten canyon. I look up to his face. Ricky says hey, and I hey back.
Saturdays at the 7-11 are what Friday nights at the VFW once were, a chance for townsfolk to gather and gossip and try their hand at lady luck. The lottery has replaced bingo, it promising a larger if more far-fetched payoff in tough times. Me, I’m not here to play the lottery. The kids just wanted Slurpees.
I stand in line waiting my turn, my eyes moving from the people around me to Ricky outside. He’s still leaning against his old Ford truck, still talking to Ralphie Cousins and Ernie Lambert, two local farmers. Ricky nods as he’s told all this rain’s good but it better slack off soon so fields can be dried out and planted. He nods, but I wonder if he’s really listening. Ricky’s not into farming. To hear him say it, he’s “Semi-retired.” That’s okay. I expect he deserves a bit of rest.
The cashier rings up my Slurpees (plus a newspaper, some beef jerky, and a can of Skoal) and tells me to have a good ’un. Ricky’s finishing the last of his beer as I push through the door. Ralphie and Ernie have retreated to their trucks.
“Hey man,” he says. He tosses the empty can into the bed of the Ford. “What’s up?”
“Slurpee run,” I tell him. “You?”
He nods and scratches at a canyon in his arm. Ricky says it still itches and likely always will. The beer helps. He says that, too. But then he’ll say he reckons the beer is like a Band-Aid over a mortal wound.
“Runnin’ around,” Ricky says. He scratches again, this time higher up on his arm, and when he does the sleeve rises a good two inches. A knot forms in my stomach at the sight. “Pretty day.”
“It is. You doin’ okay?”
“Yeah.” Ricky smiles as he says it. The knot in my stomach loosens, and I smile back. There was a time not long ago when most folks thought he’d never smile again, and for good reason. Not me. I knew he would.
He looks out over the mountains, the budding trees, the flowers across the street. He asks, “Know what got me through over there? Memory. All that sand, all that…tan. Everything’s tan, you know. Just the dirtiest, saddest tan you can imagine. I just kept remembering these blue mountains and green grass. Got me through.” Ricky reaches for another can, holds it, then puts it back. I can almost hear his thoughts—Just a Band-Aid. “Thought about them when they’s putting me back together, too. Memory. Folks say they’d like to forget a lot of things, but not me. Remembering’s important.” He looks at me and says, “We’re all a story, you know that?”
“I do,” I tell him.
Ricky scratches again and says he should be going, that there’s grass to cut. Ricky loves cutting the grass. Loves the smell. A year in Afghanistan makes you miss little things like the smell of a fresh-cut lawn.
I take my Slurpees and head to the truck. Ricky waves as he pulls away, his sleeve now caught by the wind, pushing it up to near the shoulder. The IED killed three in his squad and nearly Ricky himself. It took the doctors nearly three hours to put his body back together. It’ll take longer with his heart and his mind.
Ricky said they offered to do plastic surgery on the scars that litter his arms. He said no. Leave them. The doctors didn’t understand that. I do.
Because the truth? Ricky’s memories will always be with him, just like ours will always be with us. They’re like those empty cans rattling around in the bed of his truck, always following him. The good and the bad.
“Shouldn’t we be sad when even the bad man is killed?”
May 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 24 Comments
photo credit: theatlanticwire.com
The weekday morning routine begins with a cup of coffee and the news, that latter of which is turned off when the kids wake for school. They don’t like the news, they say. And I tell them I don’t like it much either. Those few minutes before our days begin and we are all on the sofa are usually spent watching something else.
But not this morning. This morning was different.
Perhaps I was just lost in the story, my eyes locked on the bold words in all caps at the bottom of the screen—BIN LADEN KILLED BY US FORCES. Or maybe it was the fact that my mind was divided between May of 2011 and September of 2001, leaving no room to ponder the blond-haired little girl who entered and sat beside me. Her eyes were puffed, sleepy. She yawned.
“Who’s bin Laden?” she asked me.
I remembered asking myself that very question almost ten years ago—Who is bin Laden and what has he done and why Jesus, why?—sitting on the edge of my bed in my bathrobe, just sitting there. Staring at burning buildings and soot-covered people who were bleeding and shaking and crying. I knew they were the lucky ones. The ones jumping from the upper floors of the Towers, choosing death by gravity over death by fire, they were the unlucky ones.
“He was a bad man,” I told her.
“Is the bad man dead?”
“Yes.”
“Who killed him?”
“Remember those men we see at the beach sometimes?” I asked her. “They killed him.”
She yawned again, a high-pitched, little-girl exhale that ended with, “What did he do that was so bad?”
I saw those soot-covered people again, the bodies falling. I remembered the panic that day, of fear and uncertainty so overcoming it could only be expressed in silence. The little girl beside me was in her mother’s womb then. Sitting on the table beside me were her first ultrasound pictures. I remembered looking at the screen and looking at the pictures and—God help me—wishing she would not be born into such a world. That she would be spared of such evil.
“He killed a lot of people.”
We sat in silence as the people talked on the television, relaying the events, the soldiers involved, the particulars of the raid. When they described the death, my daughter asked, “What’s a double-tap?”
“Nothing,” I said. She was too sleepy to notice my smile.
The picture on the television changed to scenes from the night before. Crowds outside the White House and in Times Square. People chanting and singing and laughing.
She asked, “Why are those people happy?”
“Because the bad man is dead.”
Another yawn, this one smaller. She put her head on my shoulder and I wished it could just stay like that forever, us there and the rest of my family close, the birds singing outside and the sun rising over the mountains.
“Is God happy, too?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I told her so.
“Are you happy, Daddy?”
“Yes. If I could, I’d shake the hand of the man who killed him.”
She didn’t know how to take that, this little girl, who’s world is small and bright and populated by fairies who alight around her room nightly as she sleeps.
“Shouldn’t we be sad when even the bad man is killed?”
I wondered, my mind divided again between the present and the past, between feeling the little girl’s head on my shoulder and seeing her still-forming head in a grainy picture while the planes fell and the people cried and the whole world seemed to end. I wondered what has become of us since, of those who wish nothing but death on our enemies and those who would rather bow than fight. I wondered of those who believe it wrong that Gandhi should reside in hell, and I wondered if they believe it equally wrong that Osama bin Laden should reside in heaven.
“I don’t know, honey,” I told her.
And I still don’t.
But I know that my daughter will grow up. Her small and bright world of fairies will one day become a big and dark world full of monsters. Monsters like him.
She yawned once more, her hand now in mine. I thought of these words from George Orwell: “We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
I don’t know if God expects me to be sad, but I know I am not.
And I don’t know if He expects me to make peace with the monsters, but I believe He would rather we fight them.
Send me
June 18, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 36 Comments
Despite all of its tourism, Virginia Beach has always been a military town. The naval base was just down the road and to the right of our hotel, and the Oceanic Naval Air Station was just a few miles beyond that.
All of which made every day resemble a Fourth of July parade.
There were plenty of these on the way into town:
And once at the hotel, we saw many more of these:
And I wasn’t alone outside yesterday morning to watch the rain. I had company in the form of Uncle Sam’s Misguided Children, otherwise known as the United States Marines:
Add to all of that the parade of destroyers and frigates passing over the horizon and the steady stream of F/A-18 Hornets flying over my head, and I had a three-day testosterone high. It all became quite the Pavlovian experience. Every engine, every thump of a rotor, and every bellow of a drill sergeant would illicit from me an immediate stare and an even more immediate, “Awesome.”
I guess it was all that testosterone that nearly got me into a lot of trouble Tuesday morning.
My wife and I decided to have an early breakfast at a nice little restaurant down from our hotel. One that didn’t promise the kind of food you could neither pronounce nor eat without proper instruction.
We decided to make our return trip via the sidewalk rather than the boardwalk, thereby avoiding the daily throng of joggers, walkers, and rollerbladers. After all, a good breakfast should always be followed by some good peace and quiet. And that’s exactly what we had for a while. Until I looked up and saw the four men jogging toward us.
“What are these guys doing?” I asked. “Don’t they know to run on the boardwalk with everyone else?”
“Don’t worry about it,” my wife told me.
But I did.
Maybe it was the fact that they weren’t following the rules. Maybe it was the identical blue T shirts with fancy emblems all four of them were wearing. I didn’t know. I did know, however, that there was no way four little jogging club nerds were going to make me move. Oh, no. They were going to get out of my way.
My wife began to veer off to the side, giving them ample room to maneuver past us. I stayed put. Our locked hands went from slack to taut, nearly pulling her off her feet.
“Let them move,” I said. “The sidewalk’s ours.”
She rolled her eyes. It was not the first time she had done so, and very likely not the last. Nonetheless, she surrendered to my macho idiocy.
The four runners crossed the road and onto our block. The two in the lead saw us in the way. Their brows wrinkled.
Uh-huh, I said to myself, I know you see me. I ain’t movin’, either.
The six of us met in front of the Atlantic Sands Oceanfront Hotel.
“Excuse us, sir,” one of the lead men said.
I didn’t move.
“You guys are supposed to be on the boardwalk with the rest of the beautiful people,” I said. “Sidewalk’s ours.”
My wife poked me in the ribs with an elbow. I ignored her.
“Our apologies, sir,” the other lead man said.
Our apologies? I thought. Oh yeah, these guys are SO intimidated by me.
Another poke by my wife. Harder.
“Sheesh,” I said, “I know city folk don’t care about manners and all, but you guys take the cake. You think you–
(poke poke POKE)
–can waltz around anywhere you want!”
(POKE POKE POKE POKE)
“What?” I whispered to my wife. “I have some manly mojo going on here.”
She ignored me. Her eyes were instead fixed on the T shirts of the men in front of us. The blue ones. With the fancy emblems.
I then realized two things. One was that there was another, very unique military base not too far from where we were standing called Naval Amphibious Base, Little Creek. The other was that the fancy emblems on the shirts of those four men said “U.S. Naval Special Warfare.”
I was picking a fight with four Navy SEALs.
My manly mojo drained along with the color from my face.
“Beg your pardon, sir,” the first man said again. “We just like to run out here because there aren’t many folks out this time of morning. We like to keep a quick pace, and that isn’t always easy with all the people on the boardwalk.”
I tried speaking, but all that came out was “Whhh…” I cleared my very dry throat and tried again. “Oh…well, um…good. That’s just…real good.”
“We appreciate that, sir,” he said, then shook my hand. When he did, I noticed the tattoo on his forearm. Written in old script beneath a sword was written, “Isaiah 6:8.”
“Hooyah,” I said.
“Hooyah,” he smile and answered. And off they went.
I didn’t say much on the way back to the hotel, and my wife was kind enough not to say much, either.
I wasn’t thinking about the nasty taste left over from having my foot in my mouth. I was thinking about the scripture tattooed on that Frogman’s arm. Isaiah 6:8. There are other verses in the Bible that carry more meaning for me, but that verse has always been my favorite.
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
For four days I relaxed in the sun and the sand, staying up late and sleeping in with little worries and few cares. Yet around me all week were people who dedicated themselves to nothing more than ensuring I could do just that. Rest. Without worry or care. Because they manned the walls and filled the breaches. Men and women who flew the Blackhawks and the fighters, who rose before the sun to run the beaches, who stood watch on the ships so we could sleep in peace.
They endure and train and fight. They are separated from families and loved ones. They live under the constant threat of mortal danger.
Not because they must. Because they choose.
Because each of them said, “Don’t send him. Don’t send her. Send me.”
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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