Read on Twitter
First memorial service I attended in 1st Special Forces Group was shortly after arrival in '92, a man who'd drowned doing a river-crossing in Malaysia. He'd gone over with another guy, half of a lead-swim / strong-swim team, to secure a rope bridge for the rest of the patrol...
..and cramped up during the swim, which can happen if you've been patrolling in high heat and humidity through jungle all day, under a ruck, and enter cold rushing water. The memorial was my introduction to the fact that SF lost people on a semi-regular basis even in "peace"...
..which I had understood in the abstract before then, but which became even more apparent as an environmental when his battle buddy described kicking the drowning man away from him. I listened to him talk about it a couple of times, fascinated and horrified, and I both hate...
..and love the hard truth that waits out there for us where we're not looking for it. 2nd memorial service wasn't far behind, a man who'd gone off-rope on Mount Everest and fallen down a crevasse. They'd looked for him until they were forced to descend. Oxygen concerns IIRC...
..and later down the road I'd learn that mountaineering, along with military freefall operations, kill a guy a year on average. Usually with mountaineering it was a heart issue that only became apparent under extreme stress, which also happened in scuba training occasionally...
..and with freefall it was usually an early pull, a premature parachute deployment, and a higher jumper would hit the canopy and break their spine. The death that occurred right before I arrived involved an SF guy going off the road in a truck in the winter about an hour...
..after an officer stated "there's no such thing as inclement weather in SF training!" which seemed like a real crowd-pleaser as many times as I heard that. Something quite similar was said in Hawaii in the 25th right before 2 helicopters crashed doing slingload operations...
..in high-winds, which is better than 2 helicopters full of dudes you know getting shot down by your own pilots, and then having to pick the burnt bodies up as part of the designated combat search and rescue team. A friend of mine had that honor in 1994. Still a bit shook...
..but all them dudes try to look after each other, one or two ODAs still carrying some heavy packs. I guess I'm getting an early start memorializing.
Widows and widowers, children who have lost parents and parents who have lost children, other various but frequently every bit as close or closer next of kin (I've met many a person raised by a grandparent), frequently get support immediately following their loss and maybe up...
..to a year after. Then support usually falls to zero. Some of these survivors lost the center of their universe, so touch base from time to time and maybe offer some emotional support. Grief is like some kind of radiation that never really goes away completely, just diminishes.
Next memorial service I attended in 1st Group was for a suicide, I think. They kind of start running together towards the middle, like the first few and the last few stand out more I guess. I remember the 1st suicide one I went to because I remember a few guys kvetching about...
..having to get their Class As (this was mid-nineties) together for "some weak motherfucker" but I heard that sentiment expressed less the more suicides that occurred and a decade later I don't recall anyone saying stuff like that anymore following a suicide.
This is supposed to be a Memorial Day themed thread but I remember it wasn't long after the suicide's memorial service that one of the older warrant officers, one of the Vietnam guys, wound up hospitalized after shoving forks in his eyes and that made an impression on young me...
..and I don't know what he'd seen but I don't particularly want to see it.
I had some mad hero-worship for a lot of the old Vietnam and Laos guys, and still have enormous respect for that crew, but those guys seemed to carry some baggage with them and some knowledge comes with a heavy cost. Hell, live through 4 near ambushes like one CW4 did and I'm...
..sure there's a shift in perspective. Some of those guys were heavy drinkers but they were mostly probably surprisingly well-adjusted, considering the absolute shit some of them had been in.
Several months after 9/11, and with GWOT the new reality, I ran into a friend who'd gone warrant and was getting ready to go through one of SF's advanced shooting schools. He told me that we'd "finally emerged from Vietnam's shadows and were now writing our own history."
I hadn't framed it in that perspective yet but he had a valid point. We were all going to get our 15 minutes of I'm not sure what, but we'd definitely own it.
Next death I remember was Nate Chapman, a friend of mine from 3rd battalion, 1st Group. I found out watching the news, which is not a great way to learn a friend died and that was the first of a few like that, and it was a body blow to see a friend's face on TV like that. That...
..was January 4th, 2002, and I hated that I was sitting in Hawaii while a friend got killed.
That sucked especially hard. Nate was good people. He was well-liked and well-respected, his death had serious impact on all those around him. Family left devastated, husband and father killed. The new reality was making itself known very early on.
Nate was in my company, C/3/1, for a few years which is where I met him. He went to the commo locker from there but we still hung out and once I gave him horrible advice I'm glad he ignored. We wound up on details together every time there was ceremonial stuff, along with...
..another couple of dudes, because we were "poster children" and got to be front and center for a lot of dog and pony stuff. Yay.
Obediah "OB" Kolath, August 28, 2005. Got killed shortly after leaving C/1/1 where I'd worked with him, good dude. Don't think I ever heard an unkind word about him. Inshallah, there's still a memorial in Okinawa for him. Made one out of a captured RPK and RPD I demilitarized...
..and I've never done that before but I figured he'd have appreciated that. Tung Nguyen, November 14, 2006. Scrappy muldoon right there and I'm not going to go too far into it because I'll get worked up but he was a good man and a helluva warrior and he deserved a better exit.
Feel like a POS because I know I'm missing people here but they'll come to me. Originally started writing vignettes because of memory issues and wanted to record stuff as I remembered, before I forgot again. Multiple concussions, CTE, heavy drinking, and some weed use don't help.
Iraq, summer 2007 was a doozy. I think there were like 10 deaths and/or memorial services in 14 days once, to include a Sergeant Major of 2/1, a sister battalion, SGM Bradley Conner. Most of the rest were ICTF guys and some that I don't even remember anymore. They blurred. That..
..summer sounded like Katyushas and gunfire and bagpipes.
Some people's lives just got straight-up squandered and that's a harsh goddamn reality.
Probably a good segue there into Afghanistan, 2011, and dead American teenagers + 20 year-olds. One kid survived an IED and I seriously contemplated visiting him in the hospital in the US to smother him because I think that would have been the kindest thing, the "hard right"...
..over the "easy wrong". That's probably a good a note as any to end on. I'll reenergize this thread on Memorial Day unless I remember more memorials first.
I wrote this to honor the fallen but I'd be a liar if I said it didn't help with my survivor's guilt ("survivor's anguish" is probably a better term) a little. Some of us who survived were left wondering why and still think about it a great deal.
