thedrifter
09-10-06, 05:22 PM
COMMENTARY
Death, war turn patriot into rueful expatriate
Sunday, September 10, 2006
MIKE HARDEN
As part of his farewell visit to Columbus, my friend Jack left behind a rusty shard of shrapnel unearthed from a field near the grave grass of Ypres.
Departing the U.S. for an expatriate’s life in Belgium, he also leaves behind a line he believed a long time ago when he went off to Vietnam:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
"It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country."
He has sampled life in the nation where he will spend his retirement years and found it agreeable. In late August, he returned to the U.S. long enough to put his affairs in order and visit his twin daughters immersed in postgraduate studies.
His itinerary provided three days in Columbus for us to rehash 40 years of friendship.
Best man, best buddy, I will miss him. Yet I know there is nothing left for him but to go.
The world fractured on a sun-spangled September morning five years ago. Jack is merely part of the collateral damage from the war that followed.
Like all of us, he was stunned by the carnage of 9/11, although he was no stranger to death in its cruelest forms.
A corpsman (as the Marines call the medics who serve them in combat), Jack returned from his tour in Vietnam in 1969, finished his stint in the military and became a forensic investigator for the office of the Suffolk County medical examiner on Long Island, N.Y.
For 30 years, his routine work fare was murder, suicide and other assorted mayhem.
He was on duty on the July night a decade ago when TWA Flight 800 blew up. "We started getting our first bodies at 1 a.m.," he said.
Somewhere in the cargo hold of the plane, there apparently had been a shipment of rainbow glitter. It dispersed over the water when the plane went down.
"The first hundred bodies we saw were all covered with this glitter," he said. "It was in their hair, on their skin. Strange as it sounds, it made those victims look almost majestic in a surreal way, like they had dropped through the clouds from heaven and been coated with angel dust."
Routine exposure to death desensitizes some. Not Jack.
When the U.S. entered Iraq, his unease grew apace with the lengthening list of the U.S. dead. Despite the attempts of the war’s architects to discount parallels to the Vietnam War, he wasn’t biting.
His tour of duty in Vietnam had convinced him that the U.S. was fighting nothing so much as the North Vietnamese birthrate. Ho Chi Minh said he was willing to lose a dozen soldiers for every one of ours he killed and that we, ultimately, would be the ones to lose heart for the fight.
After the "shock and awe" and after "mission accomplished," Jack could see the conflict in Iraq settling into the same insanity that Vietnam had become. When, a year ago, he let me in on his plans to move north, I told him he had passed up his best chance at Canada 40 years ago when he received orders for Vietnam.
Canada, as it turned out, wanted $120,000 to grant him permanent residency along with its benefits.
So it will be Belgium. He has his pension and a parttime job photographing for a genealogy Web site the headstones of Canadian soldiers who fell in World War I.
If, upon a stone, he spies the line that begins Dulce et decorum est, he now knows it is just that. A line.
Mike Harden is a Dispatch Metro columnist. He can be reached at 614-461-5215 or by e-mail.
mharden@dispatch.com
Ellie
Death, war turn patriot into rueful expatriate
Sunday, September 10, 2006
MIKE HARDEN
As part of his farewell visit to Columbus, my friend Jack left behind a rusty shard of shrapnel unearthed from a field near the grave grass of Ypres.
Departing the U.S. for an expatriate’s life in Belgium, he also leaves behind a line he believed a long time ago when he went off to Vietnam:
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
"It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country."
He has sampled life in the nation where he will spend his retirement years and found it agreeable. In late August, he returned to the U.S. long enough to put his affairs in order and visit his twin daughters immersed in postgraduate studies.
His itinerary provided three days in Columbus for us to rehash 40 years of friendship.
Best man, best buddy, I will miss him. Yet I know there is nothing left for him but to go.
The world fractured on a sun-spangled September morning five years ago. Jack is merely part of the collateral damage from the war that followed.
Like all of us, he was stunned by the carnage of 9/11, although he was no stranger to death in its cruelest forms.
A corpsman (as the Marines call the medics who serve them in combat), Jack returned from his tour in Vietnam in 1969, finished his stint in the military and became a forensic investigator for the office of the Suffolk County medical examiner on Long Island, N.Y.
For 30 years, his routine work fare was murder, suicide and other assorted mayhem.
He was on duty on the July night a decade ago when TWA Flight 800 blew up. "We started getting our first bodies at 1 a.m.," he said.
Somewhere in the cargo hold of the plane, there apparently had been a shipment of rainbow glitter. It dispersed over the water when the plane went down.
"The first hundred bodies we saw were all covered with this glitter," he said. "It was in their hair, on their skin. Strange as it sounds, it made those victims look almost majestic in a surreal way, like they had dropped through the clouds from heaven and been coated with angel dust."
Routine exposure to death desensitizes some. Not Jack.
When the U.S. entered Iraq, his unease grew apace with the lengthening list of the U.S. dead. Despite the attempts of the war’s architects to discount parallels to the Vietnam War, he wasn’t biting.
His tour of duty in Vietnam had convinced him that the U.S. was fighting nothing so much as the North Vietnamese birthrate. Ho Chi Minh said he was willing to lose a dozen soldiers for every one of ours he killed and that we, ultimately, would be the ones to lose heart for the fight.
After the "shock and awe" and after "mission accomplished," Jack could see the conflict in Iraq settling into the same insanity that Vietnam had become. When, a year ago, he let me in on his plans to move north, I told him he had passed up his best chance at Canada 40 years ago when he received orders for Vietnam.
Canada, as it turned out, wanted $120,000 to grant him permanent residency along with its benefits.
So it will be Belgium. He has his pension and a parttime job photographing for a genealogy Web site the headstones of Canadian soldiers who fell in World War I.
If, upon a stone, he spies the line that begins Dulce et decorum est, he now knows it is just that. A line.
Mike Harden is a Dispatch Metro columnist. He can be reached at 614-461-5215 or by e-mail.
mharden@dispatch.com
Ellie