Evening Gun
Confessions, The Deep, Whatnot Comments (4)
There was a guy that I roomed with for awhile at VMI. The second semester of our first year we ended up in the same room together with a ‘jock’ and an evangelical as foils to our prior-service background, meaning we’d each been enlisted for awhile. That first year at VMI is both a good and a bad experience, depending on one’s point of view. The marine was a great guy, but very serious. Yet when it came to the others in the room, specifically the one steeped in the Blood of the Lamb, he had little patience. Proselytization wasn’t appreciated. So, one morning for reasons little more than an uwillingness to be preached to by someone both unbearably friendly and naïve, he dabbed shaving cream on his head, placed two pointed cups in the shaving cream, and started chasing the ‘preacher’ around the room yelling, “I’m the devil [name here]! I’m here for your soul!”, in what constitutes the funniest scene I’ve witnessed in person, in context, ever. The evangelical left to help his father’s business at the end of the first year, completing what I felt at the time was the greatest waste of a year of endured hazing ever recorded.
The marine and I remained friends throughout our cadetship, though at sort of a distance. He was very gung ho about his line of work and I tended to view my future as the inevitable necessity that it would prove to become. He was recently awarded a bronze star for valor in the execution of an operation that found him placing himself in harm’s way willingly and repeatedly in the process of taking a number of lives during the course of saving his own and those under his charge.
Among the seemingly endless indignities that befall ‘rats’ during the first year of one’s cadetship, there is a potential and very momentary slice of redemption that comes through the opportunity to fire the evening gun during guard mount. Every night, a different company executes the changing of the guard team, which includes a formal ceremony wherein mostly first years are subject to an inspection of their weapons, followed by marching a certain post inside or outside of barracks for an hour at a time over the course of an entire day and night. During the guard mount ceremony, a ‘rat’ mans the howitzer and following the sounding of Retreat, yanks the cord, fires the evening gun *boom*, then turns and salutes the flag as it’s lowered while the bugler plays To The Colors.
It’s all very martial, as you can imagine. And cathartic in the way that explosions can tend to be.
The things that cross my mind when I hear about decorations being awarded and people being celebrated for their selfless service are the state of the awardees’ minds following the awarding of the decoration(s). They can be the heaviest weights sometimes. There’s a disconnect between surviving and being alive in the eyes of the ones who survive for a living. Memorial Day reminds me of all the times I’ve spent in far away places wondering if I was in the right place, doing the right thing for the right reasons. I’m far removed from those questions now and know that the answer was always ‘yes’ after the fact. We’re always where we belong, as far as that goes. I worry about my friends, though. There’s nothing I can do for them.
I sit in front of a marble slab and think for a living now. I’m exactly where I need to be, doing exactly what I need to be doing. This is true almost in spite of my best efforts. Yet despite all this, I always seem to feel like I’ve left something behind too soon. Every time I hear about friends being ‘decorated’, I remember all the ones that I knew that couldn’t deal with it. I ended up leaving, mostly against my will, and sit now on the outside looking in. I don’t think I ever gave closure to that part of my life and I see it played out in the trepidation I feel for all these people still in the service, many of whom I haven’t seen in years. I wonder if it’s me I worry about or them. I have a hard time being honest with myself about these things. I told the folks in the lab that I was heading back to D.C. to spend Memorial Day with military friends and they asked if it was business or pleasure. ‘Pleasure’, I said with a chuckle. I don’t really know, though.
The evening gun is fired at the last note of Retreat and the flag is lowered, but remains perpetually at half staff for a lot of people. Our society tends to think that decorations are the culmination of a military career. Often enough, they end up marking where the flag stops descending. All those who died in training accidents or in fire fights with people determined to think differently and especially those who were where they were supposed to be despite the odds and survived in spite of fate; my good friends. I wish I could take it all back. Know that every drink I take is for you.
Sir @ May 29, 2010
Finding your place in this world can make the burden of life easier to manage.
But accepting your place is another burden entirely.
Having friends willing to help with the load is what makes it all bearable.
I have yet to determine what I am here to do, so (other than having procreated – the act of passing on my genes has yet to be evaluated) I plug on day by day with no real “purpose” other than to live my life. I seldom question my existence (for fear of the answer). I do know that what I do for a living, while not contributing to the greater good of civilization (unless you count contributions of 300 thread-count sateen sheets and 100% egyptian cotton towels as necessary to humanity’s raison d’être) does help keep (a decreasing amount of) people in jobs.
When I joined the military it wasn’t with any idea to keep our nation free or out of some self-sacrifice for the good of others, it was with the mundane reasons of needing a steady job and finding what promised to be an interesting one in the USAF. There are those who (understandably) argue that if you don’t fly an airplane then your job in the AF is support for those who do, but there are exceptions to that and my job was one of them. Those of us in intel prided ourselves that ours was one of the few jobs where we did our wartime job every day – while pilots and the rest of the AF only practiced their wartime jobs in between conflicts. Very few intel types face danger, the exception being those who do airborne intel collection – and it had been a long time since the last shoot-down of an intel recon mission. The various ships that participate in the same activity rarely see action, ironically it was the Israelis who strafed and torpedoed the USS Liberty (intel-gatherer) during the ’67 war with the United Arab Republic. So, I have no real connection to those in the military who are in danger of losing their lives.
Being somewhat of a pacifist, my choice of a military job (it wasn’t a career, as it turned out) was something of a contradiction. I am, though, a pragmatist, and fully understand and agree with the need for a military, though I sometimes regret the uses to which it is put. While there are those who join the military with the selfless reason of putting their lives on the line to protect us, I believe that the majority of those who have died in the service of our nation did so more for those they served with than the loftier aim of protecting our freedoms – although the two aren’t dispirit by any means.
Regardless of the reasons, I honor their sacrifice and thank them that I am able to sit here and write these words, enjoying those freedoms that are uniquely American and that they died defending.
Every Memorial Day I wish for peace on earth.
This sense that you’ve left something behind too soon, that you have have (or had) unfinished work still to do – changing that feeling might or might not be possible. But even if it’s not, there’s always the possibility of reaching the point where, even though you feel that way, you are at peace with it. I wish you luck, and peace.