Living On Homeric Time
Six years yesterday. I thought about it a couple of times, thought about what I was doing that morning and about what ensued. Saw some faces in the dark as I drove home. Six years later, I can drive up the highway without the mild g-force of acceleration, forward movement of the vehicle, triggering a flood of armored assault memories. Emotional reactions at thoughts of the dead and sacrifice are generally less intense and do not interrupt conversation. But I still look at Purple Heart license plates and think, “That guy knows.” Talking a lot and writing a lot was good.
Hundreds of thousands more who are still in this war, or whose experience was more recent, more intense, whose losses are limbs and loved ones, don’t have the luxury of time and distance. I am grateful this anniversary finds us in a time of relative quiet, the dying and maiming greatly diminished, and I pray that our leaders are wise and capable enough to carry us through the next phase of this long war. Because it is far from over.
A friend of mine who claims some ability to read signs told me six years plus a few weeks ago in an email that this business would dominate my life for 10 years. Looks to be more or less true, though not to the extent it could have. That Homeric timeframe clearly applies to our nation, for which much is still at risk and much can yet go badly wrong, and which will be lucky to be done with this war, both Iraq and Afghanistan and the greater war in the world, within a 10-year span. Then, we still have our homecoming Odyssey still ahead of us.
Memory Lane, which is a route through the desert, the Euphrates Valley, up Baghdad’s grand boulevards and through the Assassin’s Gate, after the jump. If combat is what you like, it heats up March 31-April 10:
Topics: Iraq
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:08 am Comments (5) on Saturday, March 21, 2009
5 Responses to “Living On Homeric Time”
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March 21st, 2009 at 9:59 am
[...] I’d be remiss (and you know how much I hate that) if I didn’t mention a couple of important round-ups at Jules’s place. The first is Obama-Biden Gaffe-o-matic and related. The second has to do with the persistence of memories and the saying of sooths. [...]
March 21st, 2009 at 11:30 pm
Jules, the memories, they come and go at various times and at varying intensity, but they never go away far, or for good. It’s worse when something you might not even notice triggers something else buried in your head and them memories, they sneak back up and paste you when you don’t expect them, you are not ready for them, and they get you good. In my case, certain anniversary years are tough. This is one, number forty. For me, every day at this time of the year is an anniversary of something.
March 21, 1969, my pal SP5 Paul Schmitz Sr. was crew chief of Gator 573, a Huey slick, in the western Central Highlands of Vietnam near Dak To. An Army Mohawk recon aircraft was shot down, crew ejected. 573 went to the rescue, got one of the Mohawk crew out, and 573 was shot full of holes and went down. SP5 Paul Schmitz Sr. was also shot full of holes, rescued, and was medevac’d to Japan. I learned a couple of years ago that he eventually recovered, was medically discharged, went to work and got married, had a son. We were best pals for nine months in Pleiku. I had forgotten that I ever knew him.
(March 22, 1969, I was crew chief of Gator 834, a Huey slick, and was shot down in the same general area. I didn’t remember it until another pal of ours put it in a book. It was not the first or the last time 834 was hit or went down. I have only vague memories of the next few months, until I rotated home safe in June 1969.)
August 5, 2004, SGT Paul Schmitz Jr. was a Stryker commander in Iraq, as I recall around Mosul. Paul Jr. put his vehicle between bad guys and wounded Americans in an effort to retrieve them, and like his father 35 years before, was shot to pieces. I believe both father and son were hit by .50 cal. fire, come to think of it. Paul Schmitz Jr. was medevac’d through Germany to Walter Reed, survived though now lists to one side and has been medically discharged from the Army. He is also now divorced but has sons.
What happens on Groundhog Day in the year 2035 or so? “Where do we get such men?” is far from trite. It is very real for those who are such men.
El Crusto Grande Sends
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:18 am
hosco6 ,
Everything you say speaks true. I put a lot of things into boxes and pushed them as far away as I could. the last couple years, though, the lids seem to be lossening and every now and then something creeps out.
You are so right. It’ll be the darnedest thing that triggers a memory. Up to the VA hospital, it was a janitor using a buffer. The smell of the cleaner and wax he was using, coupled with the faint warm/electric/rubber scent and for a split second I was back in the AW space in old Hanger 3.
There are people and places and events that are lost to me. I don’t even remember them, although I can see their faces in old photos standing with me. Other things, though, are burned into my memories and I can recall clearly certain missions as though I had just flown them. My logbook is a list of alpha-numeric entries with an occasional note. But some numbers mean more than others.
The “thump thump thump” of a Huey brings the hairs on my neck up and the adrenaline starts to flow freely. Same thing with the whine of an Allison T-56. It’s so much a part of me that I can tell if it’s on a 130 or a P-3.
But there are faces and smells and noises that come at night. The hardest one has taken me years to manage. Decades, really. It’s the face of a little girl whose body I carried out of the rubble of her home. I can tell you the clothes she was wearing, how her hair was fixed, and how she seemed to be just sleeping, not a mark on her but for the dust that was everywhere. The only sound that I remember is the wailing of her mother, and the crunching of rubble under my boots. But sometimes I see her in my dreams, and other times I see some little girl with a similar face or a similar dress, and it all floods back, and I mean floods, like a wall of water smashing in. It’s all so sudden.
The smell of OD Canvas on a hot day, whether from a tent, or the cover on a deuce& a half.
Waking up on a C-141 halfway to Andrews. Tubes in my arms and lying on a stretcher, the sound of hydraulic pumps in the overhead, and the cool breeze of airconditioning. Wondering how i got there, but being in a fog. I was told later that it was the meds, that I talked a lot during the flight, but i only remember about a minute or so.
Waking up in Bethesda, in what, to me, was the softest bed I’d ever lain upon.
Sometimes, it’s just a rush of conflicting emotions for no reason at all. A feeling of such crushing sadness, or anger when I hear someone say something really stupid, and I want to ask them why they said something like that. Don’t they understand? Are they really that ignorant. And then I realize that yes, they are. they haven’t seen these things. They haven’t smelled these things. They haven’t experienced any of it. Hell, they don’t even speak the language that veterans do.
But honestly, if I were asked to do it all again, even knowing what i know now, I’d step forward and say yes. I’d go back.
My son is now in the Airborne. He’s an infantryman overseas. I had a couple talks with him about what was going to change in his life. Try to soften the transition. Give him the old man’s lessons learned. But how much he understood, and how much he blew off as the stories of his dad is yet to be seen. But I can hear the changes in his voice, the way he speaks. He’s already seen and done more in his few years than many of his friends ever will in their whole lives.
Thanks for the article, Jules. You are a gifted writer. It’s nice to know that others who understand what’s what.
March 22nd, 2009 at 1:02 pm
Thank you, Tim. I find it very encouraging every time I am reminded that we are surrounded by “such men,” aka sheepdogs, your son, Paul Schmitz Jr. Others, the sheep, get nervous about conversations such as this one. Those who don’t get it don’t like to be reminded that the wolf is lurking, waiting for the sheepdog to doze off. Fortunately for the sheep, sheepdogs, when they are not thinking of girl sheepdogs and beer, think about nothing but keeping the wolf at bay and the flock safe. It’s Darwinian, of course. (Girl sheepdogs and beer are necessary for the propagation of the species. It’s almost like there was a plan…)
March 23rd, 2009 at 1:23 am
hosco6,
Oh, there’s a plan alright… the plan is for the girl sheep to get the boy sheep in some kind of trouble :)
But seriously, though, as long as we are talking Homeric stuff, I’ll say this: I understand “The Song of Roland”. I read it and I get it, every bit of it. Same with Ivanhoe, or Achilles, or Leonidas. Places and names like Poitiers, Crecy, Ishandalwhana, Gettysburg, Stirling Bridge, Pegasus Bridge, Ypres and the Somme.
Those names are from all over, yet they are all related.
I’m rambling here, but there is a quote that has always stuck with me. It’s from the base of the Statue of general John Reynolds, at Gettysburg, who dies on July 1st, 1863, while leading the 1st Corps. It rads: “None died here with more glory, though many died, and there was much glory.”
I’ve seen the pointy end of the spear. I’ve lost friends and seen things, experienced things that I don’t want other to, and yet…. Life, like glory, is fleeting. there is something to be said for quality over quantity. For having a purpose, rather than just hanging around. For “getting it”.
Anyway, thank you too, my friend. I’d rather be out on the line, keeping the watch, than sitting home these days. But I know that there are still young men and women who get it too, and for that, I am so very grateful.
respects,