Posted on 03/21/2007 3:05:06 PM PDT by Number57
A few months ago, I found a Web site loaded with pictures and videos from Iraq, the sort that usually aren't seen on the news. I watched insurgent snipers shoot American soldiers and car bombs disintegrate markets, accompanied by tinny music and loud, rhythmic chanting, the soundtrack of the propaganda campaigns. Video cameras focused on empty stretches of road, building anticipation. Humvees rolled into view and the explosions brought mushroom clouds of dirt and smoke and chunks of metal spinning through the air. Other videos and pictures showed insurgents shot dead while planting roadside bombs or killed in firefights and the remains of suicide bombers, people how they're not meant to be seen, no longer whole. The images sickened me, but their familiarity pulled me in, giving comfort, and I couldn't stop. I clicked through more frames, hungry for it. This must be what a shot of dope feels like after a long stretch of sobriety. Soothing and nauseating and colored by everything that has come before. My body tingled and my stomach ached, hollow. I stood on weak legs and walked into the kitchen to make dinner. I sliced half an onion before putting the knife down and watching slight tremors run through my hand. The shakiness lingered. I drank a beer. And as I leaned against this kitchen counter, in this house, in America, my life felt very foreign.
(Excerpt) Read more at men.msn.com ...
So very true. I have no other words. Nothing else needs to be said.
I like your attitude! It's people like you and your son that make this a great country! I'm proud of both of you!!
Prayers continue for his safety and gratitude, as always, for his service.
I'm pretty good with words, but I'm going to remember this the next time somebody asks me what I did when I was in the Marines.
L
Thank you but I have to thank my parents. It was the way I was raised.
If you use smallish print, it might be made to fit on the back of a business card.
Not the best example I've ever seen of seven sentences strung together, but certainly one of the best.
Concur. Though I'd add Engineer Demolition Specialists to the list, who frequently deal with many of the world's potentially noisy problems by blowing them in place, negating the requirement to call on RedFenders and thereby helping keep the EOD taskings to barely-managable levels.
Freeper veterans list ping. The posted parent essay is worth a read, and I think says a lot more about all veterans than its author maybe imagined.
Freeper veterans list ping. The posted parent essay is worth a read, and I think says a lot more about all veterans than its author maybe imagined.
>Then I said, "Don't tell me, I'm not HERE,
I'm in VIETNAM BABY!"<
Ain't that the truth!
BUMP. This thread is fascinating and inspiring.
TANKS for the ping...bump...
great thread.
I do not miss military life. I hated almost every day I suffered through it. Through all the different countries and strange customs and mindsets. I silently cursed the world for the stifling heat that sapped the life out of Me, the freezing cold that threatened various necessary appendages, the endless rain that ran into My boots and was an unavoidable source of Jungle Rot -and the times of sheer terror that forced Me to react not logically but with that most primeval part of My brain that a Neanderthal could immediately relate to.
I never talk about those times with anyone. No-one has ever heard Me relate them, no matter how close they were to Me or how intoxicated I was. Well, one cop came close when I admitted to him that I had been shot at before. If he only knew... A cousin once asked Me when I first came back if I had ever killed anyone over there. Time stopped and all the memories came rushing back. Again I was there, each and every moment of danger as fresh as when they first occurred and I was unable to speak. They told Me I looked like I was looking through him and through the walls far, far into the distance. I finally looked back at him and the vast gulf of in-understandability present within the question and the innocent earnestness with which he was cocooned in and just said, "I don't want to talk about it". He persisted and asked; "So is that a 'yes'"? My other cousin jumped in and loudly said "HE SAID HE DOES NOT WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT"!
How can you explain the unexplainable?
They tell Me I thrash about in My sleep. Sometimes, before I am fully awake I can not suppress the memories quickly enough and I feel it all again. The sights, the smells, the ear-splitting sounds... and sometimes, also the unforgettable silence when a man is suddenly crossed over before he can react. I can still taste the blood. Smell the smoke. Feel the ringing in My ears from the impossibly loud sounds. And still see the faces of the long-dead. There is no way at all that I could ever wish those events to occur again. Yes, we were impossibly young -mere boys in the eyes of some (eighteen in My case) but men in ways our friends back home could never compare to. How can you possibly explain the experience of titanic masses of metal impacting together or the feeling you get when a large chunk of metal goes whizzing by your head and you realize that only a fraction of a degree the wrong way and you would be just another cooling mass of flesh awaiting the cold and silent embrace of a very small patch of ground?
Now the injuries from those days have affected My life and I an deemed no longer fit for active service. Honestly, I would be happier being able to live a more able life. So when someone says they miss those days, I tell them they must be crazy., Yes, I did ten years -far more than a single tour of duty requires, but I had My reasons. Not too long ago a man at least ten years My senior thanked Me in person for My service to our country. First time in over twenty years that has happened. I thanked him politely and then moved on as quickly as I could. Then I found a chair and spent a good long while fighting back the silent tears and trembling in My hands and weak legs from the rush of memories. And the feelings of unworthiness when I remembered good men long gone.
But if I could take the place of one young serviceman so that he would not have to have some memories similar to mine...
Better that I who have some small inkling about what to expect do it all again than have those same nightmares tormenting another lost soul.
Same here.
Oh yes.
A National Guard first sergeant pal of mine once asked my assistance in tracking down the local fella who'd first held his job when the unit was formed shortly after WWII, then as an artillery unit, now light Infantry. And the soldiers of these days wanted to invite the older ones to their private celebration of their origins.
It took me only a couple of days, and surprise, surprise: he only lived a couple of blocks from me. And I chatted with him, and he not only came to pass along their traditions to the new guys, but brought his scrapbook along; most if not all were veterans of WWII, some European, some from the Pacific. And by the 1990s, most were gone.
And in conversation later I found out that the nice quiet old gentleman who so loved aviation but whose health would no longer permit him to fly had gone through the D-Day landings at Normandy. And was out of service for several months not from any direct injury, but from deafness from mortar rounds dropping in all around him, waiting for one to fall at random right on top of the too-shallow hole that became his short-term home and possible grave. Meanwhile he watched what happened to others who had no hole to drop into.
Afterward, on limited duty, he was assigned to an artillery outfit, where deafness was common from the continuous din, which was why and how he became an artillery NCO. And the noise never bothered him; it wasn't near as bad as he'd heard on that beach.
So I asked him if over the 48 years that had passed, his nightmares had lessened any, and he told us Nope. Not a bit.
And that was when I became pretty certain that mine aren't ever going to go away, either.
Oh yes.
A National Guard first sergeant pal of mine once asked my assistance in tracking down the local fella who'd first held his job when the unit was formed shortly after WWII, then as an artillery unit, now light Infantry. And the soldiers of these days wanted to invite the older ones to their private celebration of their origins.
It took me only a couple of days, and surprise, surprise: he only lived a couple of blocks from me. And I chatted with him, and he not only came to pass along their traditions to the new guys, but brought his scrapbook along; most if not all were veterans of WWII, some European, some from the Pacific. And by the 1990s, most were gone.
And in conversation later I found out that the nice quiet old gentleman who so loved aviation but whose health would no longer permit him to fly had gone through the D-Day landings at Normandy. And was out of service for several months not from any direct injury, but from deafness from mortar rounds dropping in all around him, waiting for one to fall at random right on top of the too-shallow hole that became his short-term home and possible grave. Meanwhile he watched what happened to others who had no hole to drop into.
Afterward, on limited duty, he was assigned to an artillery outfit, where deafness was common from the continuous din, which was why and how he became an artillery NCO. And the noise never bothered him; it wasn't near as bad as he'd heard on that beach.
So I asked him if over the 48 years that had passed, his nightmares had lessened any, and he told us Nope. Not a bit.
And that was when I became pretty certain that mine aren't ever going to go away, either.
in another age, 'seeing the olyphaunt.'
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