Veterans: We owe them for doing it

Seth Thompson

Published: Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

An old friend of mine came home on leave from the military the other day. He’d been in a dusty, rocky, barren place just before that; a place populated by strange people with unfamiliar customs. Yes, you guessed it—he’d just driven through Eastern Wyoming.   Before that, however, he had spent most of the year in Afghanistan. He was flying back there the very next morning, so I gathered a few other friends together at the hacienda for an impromptu get-together. My wife made Italian sausage sandwiches in the crock pot, and my friends brought drinks, chips and desserts. We scarfed this hillbilly buffet down like we were starving, though one look at me will tell you I’m certainly not.  My friend brought a portable hard drive full of pictures, which he showed us on the computer, after our gut-stuffing feed. Pictures of his little corner of Afghanistan; the places he’d been, the troops he worked with, the little oddities that crop up in any country at war.  He showed us pictures of the time they got an up-armored Humvee stuck. It was really stuck; as in we-might-just-leave-this- where-it-is-and-blow-it–up stuck. They eventually prevailed with some help from the locals and continued with their mission.  He showed us pictures of his Afghan interpreter, who considered himself something of a ladies’ man and supposedly had a girl in every village. This is apparently quite a feat in a country filled with jealous, rifle-toting fathers and known far and wide for its blood feuds between families.  My friend added that his troops would laugh about looking for “T and A” while patrolling in Afghan villages. In this case, “T and A” stands for “Toes and Ankles”- all that’s visible on burkha-clad women in those villages. Things had been fairly quiet in his little corner of the War on Terror, though he did say he’d learned that bullets ringing off the armor of his vehicle weren’t as loud as he thought, but that terrorists’ rocket-propelled-grenades flew shockingly fast when fired past your face, rather than the lazy bottle rocket spirals you expect from the movies.    We grew silent when he showed us pictures of the aftermath of a suicide bombing that narrowly missed his troops when the dangerous but inept bomber mistakenly detonated his load at the building next door to his. We shook our heads in disbelief at his luck when he showed us pictures of a restroom in his building that had been sprayed with a buzz-saw-like cloud of broken glass from the explosion.  Later, around the campfire grate in the backyard, we drank adult beverages, shouted and laughed and even smoked a few fine cigars. We all marveled at the calm, clear night and the stunningly bright stars in the cold South Dakota sky. It was a bit frosty, but the fire made it tolerable to stay out. We talked of life and love, friends and family, cars and guns—the usual stuff our crew chatters about on the infrequent times we get together.  As the fire grew low, the cigars burned down to the nub and friends began to trickle away, pleading cold feet or sleepy heads. Eventually, just my old friend back from the war remained. We talked a bit more, but we mostly just listened as the coyotes yipped in the distance and the fire crackled and popped fitfully.  A couple of days later, it was Nov. 11, Veterans Day. Banks were closed, parades were held, flags were saluted, comrades remembered. While I lived my comfortable, mostly danger-free life here in the United States, I thought of my old friend, who was still somewhere, on his way back to a war. He was no doubt sleeping in some grimy airport lounge or adjusting his earplugs to keep the drone of a military transport plane out of his ears. While I was fretting about my seemingly major day-to-day problems, he would be scanning road sides and village squares for any hint of an ambush, trying to predict unforeseen hazards in his way, wondering where sudden death might come from.   My friend doesn’t like parades, ribbons or medals. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero. He’s not some gung-ho special operations trooper out for glory. As far as he’s concerned, he’s just another guy with a job that has to be done.  I owe him for doing it. We all do.