No Saints in a Foxhole

My soldier is home now, on the heels of a gunnery conference that begins today at Fort Rucker.  I really haven’t a clue what a gunnery conference is and I don’t feel much like caring today.  The bullshit in my life couldn’t have been made any more obvious than it became last night.  We were together last night and we were all together as well in the summer of 2001 in South Korea.

I lost my first grandmother in February of 2001.  That spring my mother’s sisters came to my home and gave me an envelope, in it was a modest sum that my grandmother had left to me.  My husband was in the middle of serving a year tour in Korea.  It was a tough year because our son was born disabled and wasn’t even a year old when he left so I took my gift from my grandmother and hauled the kids down for passport photos and we flew to Korea for the summer.

It was a wonderful summer too.  The housing on the post that my husband was sent to was all condemned so all the soldiers and families lived in the Ville as they call it with the citizens of South Korea.  We all ate Korean cuisine and our teenagers all got on a bus together and went to Lotte World and my husband took me to the world pottery expo there because I am a potter and potters love nothing more than looking at and buying other people’s pots.  I bought a whole set of dishes from a Korean potter.  They are beautiful.

I got to know my husband’s best friend a lot better that summer.  He does command sponsored tours to Korea as often as possible because he is there for two years plus at a time and his family goes with him.  His wife is Korean and they have two sons who have spent as much time with their Korean grandparents as they have with their American grandparents.

I also met Mel and Amanda that summer who lived a block from us and they had two sons then too but have three now.  Amanda was a fitness instructor.  Mel had been a Ranger before becoming an Apache pilot.  He is one of the few that in 1993 went into Mogadishu on a mission that didn’t go so well and survived.  In Korea he didn’t seem to be that comfortable being a soldier anymore and he was getting out.  I was sure that he had long ago moved on in life and was sitting on some beach some place sipping umbrella drinks until he showed up last night.  When a U.S. soldier “gets out” he is still in the reserves for awhile and Mel got to go to Iraq as a reservist and fly the hand me down airframes that the reserves get and got paid the no bonuses pay that the reservists get paid and that won’t happen to him again.  The guy who I met that summer is gone now.  The guy who survived Mogadishu and felt inspired to do something finer and more life affirming with his life than soldier has left us and in his place sits a grim faced father discussing last night with my husband and my husband’s best friend where the best bonuses are.  He’s signing up for active duty again so at least his wife can get decent wages for his combat time and he doesn’t have to fly crap in a war.

My husband’s best friend had a brother fly in just to spend the day with him yesterday because he is hard to nail down since 9/11. He did almost a total of three years in Iraq then went to Korea with his family as soon as he could because in Korea he won’t be flying combat missions and his wife can sleep.  I asked him how his wife is doing and he told me she was very happy right now because when he’s in Korea he stays in Korea but his laughter is gone from his voice now and when laughter shows up it is bitter now like mine is.  He used to be so genuinely happy and now his happiness is brittle and qualified.  On the drive home from the dinner we all shared my husband told me that his best friend is having a hard time not bouncing off the walls now since Iraq.  He tries not to drink because when he wakes up he is afraid of what he may have done.  He used to be my husband’s calming force.  They were a good team and used to fanagle their way into each other’s units and attempt to serve at the same posts with each other.  They may not be that yin yang team anymore but my husband says that they are family and it is a different family than I am, I can tell by his voice.  I get tired of having tears in my eyes and I turn away and look out the window and think to myself that these are pilots, these aren’t even the soldiers fighting on the ground.  How are those soldiers doing when it comes to bouncing and walls?

I get tired of the online debate about who voted for the war and who didn’t because enabling this war has been every bit as devastating to all involved.  There are no saints running for the Democratic nomination.  And I miss Chris Dodd because he fought for what needed to be done after the deed WAS DONE.  I picked up my pilot from the airport and he didn’t come home all clean and shiny.  HE GOT SOME ON HIM!  THEY ALL GOT SOME ON THEM!  There are no messiahs out there to save us.  Only pretty candidates that did a lot to attempt to not get any on them and what is wrong with my country that we have a hard time voting for real people to do real jobs?  We want something surreal, something without stain or blemish to save us when only we can save ourselves.

I left that Korean summer behind and flew back to the United States with the kids on September 9, 2001.  We squeaked in under the wire and September 11, 2001 was our daughter’s first day of that school year.  I hadn’t even unpacked yet and maybe I still haven’t.  I keep waiting for us to all return to that time but we won’t and I must grow up now.