Memorial Day 2018 Part Two

I looked back over what I wrote yesterday and I must say that is not a model of entirely coherent speech.  But I said at the beginning, twelve years ago, that I was not going to edit once I pushed the publish button (except for egregious spelling errors):  I write this from the heart and my heart sometimes has to grope around for the right words.  Word order is a secondary task.

Our second stop on Memorial Day was on Ft. Lewis.  Last year we got our Gold Star Family ID cards that let us go on post without an escort  or (further) paperwork but we had never actually used them.  This time we drove right up to the main gate, showed our cards and were waved right on in.  It was the least stressful entrance process that I've ever gone through at a military installation and I really appreciate that.  When we lived in Maryland, I would go to Ft. Meade from time to time and going through the gate always left me shaky and a little tearful.  The day I couldn't figure out how to raise the hood of my car was painful.  Anyway, the experience at Ft. Lewis was light years better.

Thanks to Google maps, we drove right to the Memorial Park, which is a beautiful square block filled with memorials from the various Stryker Brigades.  I think the one from Thomas's unit was the first created:  we saw it in 2005 before it was moved to the park.  We parked across the street and walked up to the stone.  And OK, here is where I get hazy.  There were a couple of guys standing around (later I found out they were not in Bravo Company and weren't part of the group I had kind of arranged to meet).  There was a bunch of Army people in dress uniforms at one of the other memorials, obviously preparing for a ceremony.  Richard and I basically stood and waited to be approached.  And, in due time, Timothy arrived and walked up to greet us.  One or two other guys showed up.  We stood and they chatted about the deployment, about Thomas, about other guys they had lost.  We speculated about the ceremony that was obviously going to be held (I realized later that I knew at least one of the families that attended).  The men we were not meeting cracked open a couple of beers in memory of their friends and kept talking.  Eventually it was time to go so we said goodbye and got in our car to head home.

We had left our flag flying at home the day before, contrary to etiquette which demands that you take in the flag in darkness (if the flag is lit up you can leave it out).  We just hoped our solar lights had stayed bright through the night.

Thomas's name is third down on the far left.  He was the first Deuce Four man lost.

Thomas would have been 27 today. I can't imagine what he would have been like as an adult man, making his way in the world after the Army--not for lack of imagination but because that is just too sad, not a place I want to go. Still, I read about his Army friends' lives on Facebook and I am glad that they are doing pretty well: raising families, going to school, working or, in one case, finishing up his time until retirement.

I did say we would buy a cake, but my husband seems to feel that it would be a bit morbid this year. I don't know. Thomas was not afraid of some pretty morbid humor--I think he'd be OK with it. Of course, he's not the one who would be eating the cake. I just wish he could be here while we frantically search for the 2 and 7 candles (we use numerals instead of little individual candles on all our cakes, recycling them or replacing them for every birthday--the "1"got a little short in the course of all the teenage birthdays).

On the other hand, I am happy to have found on Facebook, by way of Michael Yon's posts, a group called "wear blue: run to remember" which meets every Saturday near Fort Lewis (I know, I know, it's Joint Base Lewis-McChord now but it will always be Fort Lewis to me). I need to send for a shirt but other stuff keeps interfering. I just love the idea of running in memory of our fallen, something I did the year after Thomas was killed.

We went to the cemetery on July 4th and left a flag and some flowers. Unfortunately, it was very hot, very humid, and infested with gnats. We pretty much put the flowers in the vase and left. I'm not keen on getting my protein on the wing.

I will post a picture here (and maybe on facebook too) of the memorial plaque at Fort Lewis that I borrowed from someone else. We remember.

Edited later to add: We did end up buying an ice cream cake! No candles, but an awful lot of chocolate:

Our trip to Fort Lewis, October 2005. Soldiers, a wife, Anne, us. (No names for those whose permission I do not have.)

I went to a funeral yesterday for an old friend, old in both senses. We met Rodney a couple of months after Thomas was born: he died late last week at age 80, the victim of Alzheimer's and all of the physical problems that come with it. Somewhere I have a picture of Rodney holding a microphone for Thomas (who looks about 7 or 8) at a parish celebration. Losing Rodney and the others who have died since Thomas's death makes me feel as if the landscape is being thinned out. Fewer people who know what happened, fewer people who knew Thomas. The last time I saw Rodney was at Thomas's wake: he knew why he was there and he was very distressed. It was hard.



Rodney is buried at Gate of Heaven cemetery, a couple of hundred yards from Thomas.



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Michael Yon. He is an independent journalist who embedded with Deuce Four in Mosul, I think in April or May of 2005. Michael is a blogger and, nearly daily, posted riveting descriptions and photographs of the activities of the Stryker brigade in that late spring and summer. I read these entries avidly (they were linked from the StrykerNews website) because it was the closest I could come to knowing what Thomas had experienced, however briefly, in combat. Michael also talked a lot about the men he came to know, including LTC Erik Kurilla. LTC Kurilla's wife had written to us after Thomas died so I knew Thomas had (in some sense!) worked for him. I was thus more than a bit horrified to read an entry in late July, describing combat operations in the streets of Mosul which resulted in a fairly serious injury to Erik. This blog entry included photographs, some included in the book that Michael published this past year. The dust cover of Moment of Truth in Iraq has the most famous picture Michael took in Mosul: a soldier holding a child who has died, the lightning patch of the Strykers showing clearly on his sleeve. I was confronted by that photo in the Washington Times one morning, so infinitely sad and also so very human.


So. As a result of faithfully reading this blog, I actually knew a little of Erik Kurilla's story when we met him at Fort Lewis that day. He is very tall (6'5" or 6") and dashing, despite the crutches he was still using as a result of his injury in August, a little over two months earlier. He knew who we were, he told us more about the incident in which Thomas was killed, we even talked about the other soldiers whose stories I knew as a result of the StrykerNews forum.

Michael Yon continued to blog from Iraq as an independent journalist, eventually turning those blog entries into a book. One day in 2007, I stumbled across an entry in which he talked about having found a prayer card with the words from "Be Not Afraid", a song we use frequently in Mass (I think the words are from Isaiah). Thomas knew this song: I started crying when I saw it and in fact it's been nearly impossible to sing it ever since then (perhaps not coincidentally, it was used at Rodney's funeral yesterday).


Thank you, Michael.