THE MOUNTAIN AND THE MAN
Sometimes you just make an exception.
And this is one of those times.
Last Saturday a bunch of cops hiked a mountain and left behind a reminder of their dead buddy.
It was a little plaque, about a foot square. They climbed the highest peak in Utah and got off the trail a ways and on the side of a boulder, where no one would ever see, they calked the plaque in place.
It was dedicated to their SWAT buddy, a Marine reservist, a man who went to war to take care of his troops. A man who died in Iraq.
Now the environmentalists and the bureaucrats want them to take it down.
If they don’t, the federal government will.
It’s one thing to die for your country, I guess, but don’t expect it to mean anything to anybody.
His name was James Cawley. Jimbo, they called him. A detective, and a SWAT man, a veteran of the Salt Lake City Police Department, a staff sergeant in the Marine Corps Reserve. Forty-one years old and a family man.
He died in March of last year.
Anyway, Saturday was September 11 – the three-year anniversary. And on seven mountains across America various cops climbed to the top, carrying memories and mementoes, in honor of their buddies.
The climb for Jim Cawley was put together by an assistant chief. It was seven guys from the SWAT team and Jim’s brother Mike.
And it was a touching story in the paper on Sunday. A reminder that people can be gone but not forgotten, that a grateful nation doesn’t forget, that atop King’s Peak there was a silent testament that freedom isn’t free.
That’s what most got out of the story.
Some, though, got something else. They took offense.
The tree huggers. The wilderness freaks.
They didn’t see a remembrance, they saw a desecration. They cared more about the mountain than the man. And on Monday morning they called to complain.
See, King’s Peak is in the Ashley National Forest. Specifically, it’s in the High Uintas Wilderness Area. Like some two-thirds of Utah, it’s federal land. And the federal government makes the rules. More specifically, activists and their law suits make the rules.
And while you can hike in wilderness areas, you better not leave footprints. And you better not leave a plaque.
Because some self-righteous prig reading the paper is going to complain, and some other self-righteous prig sitting in the ranger shack is going to agree.
“It’s not a place for monuments,” the ranger told the paper. “This is a special place.”
Which is funny, because I didn’t think there was anyplace so special that the name of an American who died in the service of his country would be out of place. It would seem like giving your life for the defense of the nation would mean something.
So that’s the situation.
There is a little plaque on one of a million boulders near the top of one of a thousand Rocky Mountain peaks, and the environmentalists and the bureaucrats say it has to come down. They don’t know where it is, they couldn’t find it if their lives depended on it, but it offends them.
All they know is what they read in the paper.
If the cops hadn’t spoken to the reporter, nobody would have been any the wiser. In uniform they call that “op sec” – operational security. It’s what you do in combat. Who’d have thought you’d need to worry about it at home.
Like I said, sometimes you just make an exception.
And it seems like somebody with the title “congressman” or “senator” ought to be able to figure out how to make an exception. I mean, aren’t those the people who vote on Forest Service budgets?
It seems like there ought to be something people of good conscience on both sides of this could do to reach an accommodation. After all, this wasn’t a flagrant violation of the rules. Jim Cawley’s buddies called a guy in the Forest Service, before they went up the mountain, and he told them it would be OK. He later said he “got caught up in the moment,” but it seems like the word of a government official ought to mean something.
There’s no reason this has to end dumb. There’s no reason this has to end with the disrespecting of a good man’s name. There’s no reason this has to end breaking the hearts of the cops who wanted to remember their buddy.
That plaque is in the mountains. It is part of the mountains. It ought to stay right where it is.
And those people with the fancy titles ought to make sure that it does.
Because, while just eight men climbed King’s Peak on Saturday, they were representing us all.
- by Bob Lonsberry © 2004
http://www.lonsberry.com/writings.cfm?story=1493
http://www.militarycity.com/valor/256582.html
