thedrifter
12-17-06, 09:05 AM
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Ahearn: Father recalls Marine who was a boy
Greensboro News-Record -
The last time they locked eyes was before his son's second tour of Iraq.
They were both in Greensboro -- Andrew getting ready to rejoin the Marines in his Mobile Assault unit, his father, Roland Russoli Sr., about to leave for mission work in the mountains of Mongolia, between Russia and China.
When it was time for Russoli to go through airport security, he turned to say goodbye. What Andrew said would later come back to haunt him.
"He said, 'Watch your back,' " the father recalled. "It was a strange look. Like he wouldn't see me again."
Russoli came home to Greensboro last week, visiting for the first time since Andrew's funeral in November 2005. A few months after that cryptic goodbye at PTI airport, Andrew has been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the first soldier from Greensboro to die in the war, but not the last.
Sipping coffee last week in a booth at Tex & Shirley's, Russoli could see across the parking lot the Macaroni Grill where they had dinner together that summer, between the son's first and second tour.
Andrew was quiet that night, different. Early in his first tour of Iraq, he had been full of boyish bravado. In one letter, he described how a bomb blew up in front of their vehicle, creating a massive cloud of sand and dust, from which the Humvee emerged unscathed on the other side.
"It was just like the part in 'The Man in the Iron Mask,' " Andrew wrote. "It was so cool."
But by the time he came back that summer before his second tour, he didn't want to watch movies anymore, especially his favorite, "Black Hawk Down," about a 1993 Mogadishu helicopter assault.
No, there had been too much reality in between. He had been through 19 firefights, had been wounded and received a Purple Heart, and in summer 2005, he was home in one piece. On the outside, anyway.
Inside, the father wasn't sure. He looked into Andrew's green eyes and remembered a boy, full of fun, who always hooked a finger in his father's pocket when they crossed the street. How was that boy doing with all this?
"He was having nightmares about some of the things that occurred, about shooting people and watching them die," Russoli said. "He was in battles. It's hard to do that and still be that little boy inside. It takes a big piece of you."
The night at Macaroni Grill, Russoli's older son had left the table when Andrew finally spoke, talking about what he wanted to do after his second tour of Iraq.
"I think I want to become a firefighter," he told his father. "I want to save lives."
It gets so cold in Ulaanbaatar that it burns, as if you were holding a Bic lighter too close to your cheek. It was 27 below the morning Russoli left 10 days ago on his 32-hour trek home from the city between four mountains.
From Greensboro, where Andrew graduated from Northwest and where his father directed volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, Ulaanbaatar is the edge of the world.
And no better place to be, when a whole piece of the future has been erased -- all the birthdays, holidays, snapshots never to be. How do you get through the motions? That was the question the father of another Northwest graduate since killed in Iraq asked Russoli, a more experienced member of this unenviable fraternity.
How do you do Christmas?
"You can't do things the same way," Russoli answered. "It's too painful."
After returning to Mongolia from his son's funeral -- around the same time President Bush visited the country and met privately with Russoli -- the father found a way to do things differently.
He canceled the morning English classes he teaches in Ulaanbaatar and went to work in an orphanage run by French nuns.
The children there have been abandoned -- some left as toddlers on street corners, some dumped in trash cans as babies, this in a city where homeless adults routinely freeze to death.
So last Christmas, Russoli and his wife, Sarah, a Peace Corps medical officer he married two years back, spent $100 on black market toys -- a mountain of puzzles, dolls, Lincoln Logs and trucks.
Russoli put on the orphanage's heavy wool Santa suit, with a cheap beard that slipped to and fro, and watched each face, as the children carried off their piles of treasure.
They taught him something, as he sat there sweating in his Santa suit and his cheap beard. In an orphanage on the frozen edge of the world, children abandoned on street corners and left in garbage cans could still be alive in this moment and still feel joy, not dwelling on the past.
They took his mind off a man he will never get to know, a handsome little boy who hooked a finger in his father's pocket as they crossed the street together. A boy he can't let go.
Ellie
Ahearn: Father recalls Marine who was a boy
Greensboro News-Record -
The last time they locked eyes was before his son's second tour of Iraq.
They were both in Greensboro -- Andrew getting ready to rejoin the Marines in his Mobile Assault unit, his father, Roland Russoli Sr., about to leave for mission work in the mountains of Mongolia, between Russia and China.
When it was time for Russoli to go through airport security, he turned to say goodbye. What Andrew said would later come back to haunt him.
"He said, 'Watch your back,' " the father recalled. "It was a strange look. Like he wouldn't see me again."
Russoli came home to Greensboro last week, visiting for the first time since Andrew's funeral in November 2005. A few months after that cryptic goodbye at PTI airport, Andrew has been killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq, the first soldier from Greensboro to die in the war, but not the last.
Sipping coffee last week in a booth at Tex & Shirley's, Russoli could see across the parking lot the Macaroni Grill where they had dinner together that summer, between the son's first and second tour.
Andrew was quiet that night, different. Early in his first tour of Iraq, he had been full of boyish bravado. In one letter, he described how a bomb blew up in front of their vehicle, creating a massive cloud of sand and dust, from which the Humvee emerged unscathed on the other side.
"It was just like the part in 'The Man in the Iron Mask,' " Andrew wrote. "It was so cool."
But by the time he came back that summer before his second tour, he didn't want to watch movies anymore, especially his favorite, "Black Hawk Down," about a 1993 Mogadishu helicopter assault.
No, there had been too much reality in between. He had been through 19 firefights, had been wounded and received a Purple Heart, and in summer 2005, he was home in one piece. On the outside, anyway.
Inside, the father wasn't sure. He looked into Andrew's green eyes and remembered a boy, full of fun, who always hooked a finger in his father's pocket when they crossed the street. How was that boy doing with all this?
"He was having nightmares about some of the things that occurred, about shooting people and watching them die," Russoli said. "He was in battles. It's hard to do that and still be that little boy inside. It takes a big piece of you."
The night at Macaroni Grill, Russoli's older son had left the table when Andrew finally spoke, talking about what he wanted to do after his second tour of Iraq.
"I think I want to become a firefighter," he told his father. "I want to save lives."
It gets so cold in Ulaanbaatar that it burns, as if you were holding a Bic lighter too close to your cheek. It was 27 below the morning Russoli left 10 days ago on his 32-hour trek home from the city between four mountains.
From Greensboro, where Andrew graduated from Northwest and where his father directed volunteers for Habitat for Humanity, Ulaanbaatar is the edge of the world.
And no better place to be, when a whole piece of the future has been erased -- all the birthdays, holidays, snapshots never to be. How do you get through the motions? That was the question the father of another Northwest graduate since killed in Iraq asked Russoli, a more experienced member of this unenviable fraternity.
How do you do Christmas?
"You can't do things the same way," Russoli answered. "It's too painful."
After returning to Mongolia from his son's funeral -- around the same time President Bush visited the country and met privately with Russoli -- the father found a way to do things differently.
He canceled the morning English classes he teaches in Ulaanbaatar and went to work in an orphanage run by French nuns.
The children there have been abandoned -- some left as toddlers on street corners, some dumped in trash cans as babies, this in a city where homeless adults routinely freeze to death.
So last Christmas, Russoli and his wife, Sarah, a Peace Corps medical officer he married two years back, spent $100 on black market toys -- a mountain of puzzles, dolls, Lincoln Logs and trucks.
Russoli put on the orphanage's heavy wool Santa suit, with a cheap beard that slipped to and fro, and watched each face, as the children carried off their piles of treasure.
They taught him something, as he sat there sweating in his Santa suit and his cheap beard. In an orphanage on the frozen edge of the world, children abandoned on street corners and left in garbage cans could still be alive in this moment and still feel joy, not dwelling on the past.
They took his mind off a man he will never get to know, a handsome little boy who hooked a finger in his father's pocket as they crossed the street together. A boy he can't let go.
Ellie