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He was somebody

BY J. Isaac Small
jsmall4@mscd.edu

My friends and family were slow to accept my decision to join the Army. It was November of 2001. The decision to enlist came to me suddenly, almost as suddenly as the planes crashed into the World Trade Center, into The Pentagon and in rural Pennsylvania.

I was tired of being a nobody.

In basic training we were broken down from our individual selves and trained to work as cogs in a machine. This is the basic building block of the War Machine: If the machine works, all the cogs are happy, but when the cogs malfunction it sucks for everybody.

My fellow cog was a scrawny kid, Hike – from Iowa. It took me several weeks to learn his first name, Adrian. We were soon stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany, in the First Squadron, Fourth Cavalry. Our nickname was the Quarter Horse.

Hike and myself tried to drink every beer in Germany, and we had all the help we could ask for. Jagermeister and Bud Light were regular menu items. There was absinthe, too, for when we wanted to forget something.

Hike and I were gainfully employed just watching each other’s backs. He was the kind of friend I don’t think you can have unless you are, or were, a cog.

Hike went without me to Iraq in 2003. I was medically discharged.

Weeks before I enrolled at Metro, I drove to Iowa to see Hike while he was on R&R. His mom claimed me as an adopted son. I’ll never forget how we spent $600 at a strip club the last night of his vacation from war.

I never got to see Hike again. But we communicated by MySpace and other electronic means.

He told me he received a Purple Heart when a car bomb went off behind him, smashing his face into a part of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle he spent all his time in. His face was virtually destroyed and the rest of his deployment was spent recovering at home.

Plastic surgery, he said, made him breathe better than he ever had.

Two years later he received his second Purple Heart in Afghanistan when he died.

An improvised explosive device detonated in the road under his humvee. Hike went in the way all cogs fear the most: not knowing you just said your last words. In a flash he was gone and the valley slopes were lit up by the fury of American bullets.

His MySpace profile read, “I’m more afraid of being nothing than I am of getting hurt.”

The week of Thanksgiving 2007 saw more guests through Carroll, Iowa than most years.

Men who served with Hike came in waves from Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Jersey and Denver, as well as his friend and escort from Afghanistan. Hike’s bride-to-be flew in from Germany. He had bought the ring over the phone from his brother’s jewelry store, but had not yet proposed to her. I had to tell her, as an adopted son, that she too was now adopted into the family.

The whole town knew about the funeral for this soldier, but they didn’t know the cavalry would roll in.

It was a reunion. Conley had been stationed in Africa after the Iraq deployment. He brought his fiancée and his favorite story was about his pet monkey biting him. Windburn had joined the National Guard. Gauthier had gotten out by telling an Army shrink what he would do if he had to go to Afghanistan.

Most of these soldiers – including me – shared a concern about the possibility of protesters at the funeral. Imagine trying to give a brother back to the earth, and being confronted with a pack of idiots waving signs and chanting. The cavalry fights, and all of them wanted a round with a protester. The Patriot Guard set flags outside the funeral home. The city flew a flag from a fire truck. But there were no protesters. No protesters.

No protesters. It seemed like a dream come true that none of the local civilians came to tell us what fools we were for fighting in a war.

Those who protest the war also claim to support the troops. But that line is thin and blurred. They want to keep the soldiers safe, they say, out of harm’s way. Bring them home. But what no protestor can understand is that the troops are safe knowing they are keeping your home out of harm’s way.