storyteller
Not too many words on a day like this. There isn’t much I could try to say that would do anything other than diminish the sacrifice of so many. So for today, I’m just going to ask that you watch the video below. And I’ll ask that for just a moment, you bow your head in remembrance of all those brave souls who have fought and fallen on faraway lands so you and I can remain at home in peace.
Ask him about his medals, and he’ll politely demur—smile and say that he doesn’t really like to talk about them, doesn’t even look at them himself, they’re shoved in a dresser drawer along with some Hanes T shirts and his socks. Not that he isn’t glad to have them. Mostly, it’s because none of them are really his alone. To his thinking, the purple heart was just as much the Afghani insurgent’s who made the IED, and the bronze star should have been given to the five members of his platoon who didn’t make it back.
He didn’t bring his legs home, brought instead new ones made of metal and plastic. He’s learning to get around, likes to call himself The Terminator. Sometimes he laughs when he says that. Sometimes he doesn’t.
He says it’s tough coming back to the world. Afghanistan was no paradise (no doubt about that), but things were different there. Life gets stripped down to the barest of essentials in a warzone. You learn to take pleasure in the little things—a hot meal, a cold shower, the sunrise after a long night of firefights and RPG attacks. He’ll tell you that the reason he picked up his weapon every day, the reason he fought, wasn’t so much for freedom or America, but to protect the men and women who fought beside him. To make sure they all came home.
A lot of them didn’t. He has dreams about that sometimes. Sometimes he’ll be running towards his friends, hearing their screams and calls for help, and he says they are awful dreams but at least in those dreams he still has his legs.
He isn’t bitter. He knew what he was signing up for, where he would likely be deployed. His life now is just another challenge, one he’ll meet. I think he’s right. I pray for it. He’s still trying to get used to his new life. Right now, he’s stuck in some sort of earthly purgatory, a thin place between his world before and his world after. He’s finding his way, but the way is hard. Right now, he’s doing some odd jobs, making some home repairs and cutting people’s grass. There’s nothing like the smell of fresh-cut grass, he says. That more than anything else tells him that he’s home.
There’s a lot of talk about heroes nowadays. The term is bandied about with a kind of recklessness, given to everyone from athletes to tornado survivors to political activists. The word “hero” is a lot like the word “love” in that way. It’s used for so many things in so many situations that meaning of the word gets watered down. It loses its power.
But he’s a hero. I have no doubt about that. This man who still dreams of hell and uses a thin, curved piece of heavy plastic to push the gas pedal on his John Deere mower. Who will replace your toilet or paint your living room. This man who left half of himself in the desert for all of us.
This man who’s just trying to find his way.
God bless him.
Yesterday was no big deal. Sundays aren’t really supposed to be. It was a sleep in and go to church, come home and eat, take a nap during the football game kind of day. The best day.
And it was Veteran’s Day. Big deal around here. There are quite a few veterans in this small town and the mountains and hollers around it, and yesterday that stood up in our churches and accepted our thanks and ate half price at our restaurants. This is a good thing. I was too young to remember the end of the Vietnam War, but I know the stories of what many of our soldiers faced when they came home. It’s nice that whatever our politics may be, this country can unite around those who’ve fought and died just so we can have the right to disagree.
One more thing about yesterday:
My wife and I fully intend to take care of Christmas early this year. No last minute scrambling for gifts, no tardiness on Christmas cards. Get it done and done quick, then just sit back and enjoy. That’s our plan. So yesterday we told the kids it’s time for wish lists.
Reading over those (Legos and a 3DS for him, books and more books for her) made me think of something else that tied in a roundabout way to Veterans. It happened on the Western Front around Christmas in 1914, in the midst of World War I. And though no American forces were involved, I still want to share it. It goes to a larger story, I think. One about all of us.
In that week leading up to Christmas, fighting in the trenches between German and British soldiers slackened. Enough, in fact, that soldiers from both countries would even walk across no-man’s land bearing gifts. Season’s greetings were exchanged. And in those brief but welcomed moments between the gunfire, soldiers often heard the singing of carols. It all culminated on the Christmas Eve and Christmas Day almost a hundred years ago, when both sides decided on their own that war simply wasn’t right. They joined together for those two those days not as enemies, but as human beings. There were joint ceremonies to bury the dead. There was even a friendly soccer match.
The war went on after that, of course. There were attempts the following year for another Christmas truce, but it was not as widespread. The generals—ones who strategized and ordered but rarely fought and bled—prohibited it. Poison gas began to be used. The levels of fighting and dying greatly increased. Each side began to view the other as less than human.
I thought about that a lot on Sunday, sitting there in my comfortable living room with my family around me and the sun shining outside.
I am thankful for my country. I am thankful for those who’ve fought and died for me. And yet even as I give thanks I also mourn for the families left shattered, both by those who never returned from war, and those who went to war thinking they’d never return only to come home and not survive the peace they deserved.
I understand this is a mean world. I know there are people and nations who want nothing more than to see the end of this country, and I thank God daily that I can work and rest and play thanks to the men and women who wear our uniform and bear our flag.
I am not a pacifist. Yet I wish for peace, even as I know that peace will never come.
But I wonder what would happen if all the men in all the wars that rage upon this earth would one day decide war simply wasn’t right. I wonder what would happen if we saw everyone as human. People who struggle and hurt and dream and love just as we do.
Ask him about his medals, and he’ll politely demur—smile and say that he doesn’t really like to talk about them, doesn’t even look at them himself, they’re shoved in a dresser drawer along with some Hanes T shirts and his socks. Not that he isn’t glad to have them. Mostly, it’s because none of them are really his alone. To his thinking, the purple heart was just as much the Afghani insurgent’s who made the IED, and the bronze star should have been given to the five members of his platoon who didn’t make it back.
He didn’t bring his legs home, brought instead new ones made of metal and plastic. He’s learning to get around, likes to call himself The Terminator. Sometimes he laughs when he says that. Sometimes he doesn’t.
He says it’s tough coming back to the world. Afghanistan was no paradise (no doubt about that), but things were different there. Life gets stripped down to the barest of essentials in a warzone. You learn to take pleasure in the little things—a hot meal, a cold shower, the sunrise after a long night of firefights and RPG attacks. He’ll tell you that the reason he picked up his weapon every day, the reason he fought, wasn’t so much for freedom or America, but to protect the men and women who fought beside him. To make sure they all came home.
A lot of them didn’t. He has dreams about that sometimes. Sometimes he’ll be running towards his friends, hearing their screams and calls for help, and he says they are awful dreams but at least in those dreams he still has his legs.
He isn’t bitter. He knew what he was signing up for, where he would likely be deployed. His life now is just another challenge, one he’ll meet. I think he’s right. I pray for it. He’s still trying to get used to his new life. Right now, he’s stuck in some sort of earthly purgatory, a thin place between his world before and his world after. He’s finding his way, but the way is hard. Right now, he’s doing some odd jobs, making some home repairs and cutting people’s grass. There’s nothing like the smell of fresh-cut grass, he says. That more than anything else tells him that he’s home.
There’s a lot of talk about heroes nowadays. The term is bandied about with a kind of recklessness, given to everyone from athletes to tornado survivors to political activists. The word “hero” is a lot like the word “love” in that way. It’s used for so many things in so many situations that meaning of the word gets watered down. It loses its power.
But he’s a hero. I have no doubt about that. This man who still dreams of hell and uses a thin, curved piece of heavy plastic to push the gas pedal on his John Deere mower. Who will replace your toilet or paint your living room. This man who left half of himself in the desert for all of us.
This man who’s just trying to find his way.
God bless him.
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.
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.