thedrifter
10-12-07, 07:45 AM
October 10 11:51 PM
One Marine's Story
Published in News & Commentary
By James D. McCallister
Lance Corporal Daniel Ramsey (USMC—ret.) has been a friendly, recognizable face around Five Points for a long while now, but when I ran into him on the Avenue a few months ago, I realized it had been quite some time since he’d been hanging around the coffee shop, a favorite haunt for as long as I have known him.
I asked Dan what he’d been up to since I had last seen him. “I just got out of the Marines,” he replied. “I got hurt.”
Since I knew he’d already served a late-90’s stint in the Navy as a Seabee, I was surprised to hear that he’d rejoined the service, particularly in light of the danger of doing so in these politically volatile times. Ramsey’s reasons, though, were far from political in nature—not only did he come from a military family background, but once the U.S. invaded Iraq, he said he felt a “calling” to do what he could to help.
“A couple of my friends got killed on that first push into Baghdad,” he explained. “When that happened, I thought to myself, there’s something I need to do. I need to get back in the fight.” His decision was about more than just getting into combat, however. “I also thought that, if I do this, then maybe somebody else, some young kid, won’t have to.”
Ramsey understood that, with his prior military experience, he could be a good influence on troops who would be almost uniformly younger than him. Even though he was only twenty-four at the time of his reenlistment, he says, “I got called ‘grandpa’ a lot. Out of a few hundred guys, I was the oldest.”
He could have easily resumed his Naval career, but he figured that if he were to sign back up, he would go for the gusto, so to speak, and become a Marine infantry rifleman. After going through basic training at Parris Island (no, you don’t get to skip that part just because of prior service), he was stationed first at Camp Geiger in North Carolina for infantry training, then later Camp Lejune.
It wasn’t long before his unit, part of the 2nd Marine Division, was deployed. But Ramsey did’t immediately find himself in the Middle East.
“I was part of an MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) stationed off West Africa on the (USS) Gunston Hall,” a Whidby Island-class docking/landing ship. In this period of his service, he was working with Spanish, British, and Italian marines paying what were in essence goodwill visits to various African countries, “making friends,” he says, with homegrown military units, visiting dignitaries, and the like.
Most of his missions overseas, whether in Iraq or otherwise, remain classified operations that he is unable to describe in any significant detail, including what he refers to as a number of “incidents” in the Africa countries he visited.
I wondered about the obviously covert nature of such activities, but Ramsey explained that the USMC is different: Unlike the other branches of the service, which require the assent of congress to be deployed on missions, “We [Marines] serve at the pleasure of the Commander-in-Chief. All the president has to do is point at a map and we go.”
After the West African stint, his unit found themselves in Jordan, on a mission to assist in the training of Jordanian police and military personnel.
It wasn’t long before the firepower and training of Ramsey’s unit were needed across the border, however: First, an entire platoon of snipers were sent into Iraq, and shortly thereafter the rest of the unit was ordered to cross into the active war zone, to fight in areas like Faluja and Ramadi, names now all too familiar to those who have followed the U.S. war effort in Iraq.
It was during these combat operations that Ramsey found himself engaged in a number of challenging situations. While again eschewing specifics, he said he was just doing the job that Marines are routinely sent to do: to engage and destroy the enemy, clearing the way for other military units to come in and do their various jobs, be it further combat, or otherwise.
Ramsey is not so gung-ho that he revels in his time while in the active fire zone. “I did things that I’m not proud of,” he says. When pressed to elaborate—I asked him quite specifically if he knew that he had killed anyone—he indicated that he doesn’t necessarily mean that he ever took any improper action, only that he participated in what would best be described as the standard ugliness of warfare. “But I try not to think about that too much.”
I asked him how the Iraqi people appeared to receive the American troops. “From what I could see, they loved us—but it could have been the fact that we were handing out free stuff, stuff they needed. We were giving them food and water, which they desperately needed, and candy—the kids especially seemed to love us.”
Ramsey’s training included general directions so as not to offend the Muslim culture, but when asked about religious affiliation of the indigenous population he encountered, he replied that he had no idea, and suggested that basic human needs such as hunger apparently cut across ethnic and sectarian lines.
It was in July of 2006, after he and his squad were once again sent across the border, that Ramsey found himself suddenly injured—though as fate would have it, his difficulty arose not from a combat wound, but from an occurrence as prosaic as a traffic accident.
“We were hauling ass along the side of a road, up on a slope,” he said of a route designed to avoid IEDs and other potentially ruinous obstacles on the road below.
But rather than enemy activity, it was a simple oversight that would effectively end what he now hoped was to be a lifelong career in the service of his country.
“The driver forgot to put in one small pin in the tailgate of the vehicle, one that actually helps hold the entire side on.” When that same driver swerved sharply to avoid an object on the hillside, the entire body of the vehicle unexpectedly flew open, and Ramsey, along with three other infantrymen, flew out onto the ground. “I landed on my forehead going forty miles an hour. And with all my gear on, I probably weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, even though I was only about 180 at the time. The last thing I remember seeing were my heels flying over my head—it was strange.”
Ramsey’s compatriots weren’t badly hurt in the accident, but he was—though the severity and extent of the injuries would not become apparent for some time. “I looked like the Elephant Man—a huge lump on my head, scrapes, bruises. I had numbness in my hands. My neck was in bad shape.” He doesn’t remember too many details after hitting the ground, but his buddies in the squad said Ramsey’s Marine training never seemed to desert him: As he lay injured on the hard, unforgiving ground, he was primarily concerned with ascertaining the whereabouts of his weapon.
His injuries were obviously too delicate to be handled by a field medic, and Ramsey was sent to the closest facility that could accommodate him, which in his case happened to be the Prince of Jordan’s personal hospital. “I even met the Prince,” Ramsey smiled. “But I don’t really remember it.”
As regal as the facility might sound, the equipment found therein was far from state of the art. As a result, the damage to his neck was not accurately diagnosed, though he didn’t realize it at the moment. “They said I had a severe neck sprain, and gave me pain medication.”
He was back on his feet the next day, and then returned to his unit in spite of continuing to be in great discomfort. He was assigned what is known as “light duty,” which he explained means simply hanging back a bit while regaining the strength to return to the front lines, if necessary.
The respite was brief, however: Light duty, in his case, ended up being very dramatic indeed, as his unit was suddenly redeployed to assist with yet another incipient Middle Eastern crisis: The sudden evacuation of the 25,000 Americans living in Lebanon, necessitated by the open warfare that had unexpectedly erupted between Israel and Hezbollah.
I asked him if any of the refugees noticed his facial injuries, which were still fairly extensive and fresh at the time of this sudden mission. “Not really. They were mostly happy to just be getting out of Lebanon. Rockets were landing nearby.”
Time passed, and while his cosmetic injuries healed, he continued to suffer from severe pain, “about a seven out of ten,” he reports, even with generous quantities of medication. (He would later discover that he had developed an ulcer from the large doses of ibuprofen given to him by medics, though as he found out, this unpleasant condition was the least of his problems.)
Ramsey said that, after two months of distress, “They finally started realizing that I wasn’t getting any better. I would drop things out of my hands, I couldn’t get out of bed.”
Being stationed on a ship, his bunk was part of a stack of five other, narrow beds, and he found himself almost unable to get in and out of his cramped personal space. Ramsey then began what became a Byzantine medical odyssey, along which he discovered that the answers to his problems were neither easy nor forthcoming.
He went to Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, even Baghdad in search of the MRI equipment necessary to accurately diagnose his injuries—but none of the facilities had the capability he needed. Finally, he was slated to be transported to the U. S. Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for an extensive MRI.
The flight from Kuwait, on a cargo plane filled with burned and wounded soldiers, was a grim journey indeed. “It was the saddest flight I’ve ever been on. I saw a lot of burn victims. When you get hit by a bomb or an IED, you get burned.” One soldier, incinerated from head to toe, even died in transit.
And Ramsey, in spite of his pain, couldn’t help but feel guilty among his fellow soldiers—these were the true war-wounded, with missing limbs and other horrendous, acute injuries. “But by then, you couldn’t even tell by looking at me that I was hurt. I felt like an *******.”
But hurt Ramsey was: The extent of his neck injuries became clear once a proper MRI was performed, and it was discovered that he had two smashed discs in his neck, a condition made worse by the lag time between the accident and the proper diagnosis. At that point, it was decided that the treatment he required necessitated a trip back stateside.
“It wasn’t until I got back (to Camp Lejune) that a doctor finally said what had really happened.” The hairs on his arms stand up at the memory. “I’ll never forget that day. They said I had broken my neck.”
As it turned out, when he struck the ground his head had apparently snapped all the way back, and the subsequent bone injuries had calcified in the lengthy interim since the accident.
Ramsey was prescribed a regimen of physical therapy, but he found out that to repair the damage to the vertebrae in his neck, he would need surgery to fuse the bones together with a four-inch titanium plate. The operation was a success, though Ramsey will continue to have limited movement in his neck for the rest of his life. He is unable to turn his head to the right, or to look upwards without leaning back.
“I’ve also got nerve damage,” he added, describing numbness in his fingers, muscle twitching, and disrupted sleep. “I get an hour here and an hour there,” he said with a rueful smile. “Maybe four hours total a night.”
His experiences as a medically-disabled veteran bear out the complaints others have made about the VA system of health care for our returning combat veterans.
“The problem is that they won’t tell you what you need to know. You have to know what to ask for,” he says of the various medical benefits, follow up treatment, and so on (a function, no doubt, of the entrenched bureaucracy that reportedly plagues the VA and other federal government agencies).
Overall, though, Ramsey is happy with his experience in the military. He has money to go to college (after his experiences rehabbing from his injuries, he is considering a career in physical therapy), and he will have a lifetime pension and medical care no matter what he ends up doing for a career.
Inevitably, perhaps, our discussion turned to the toxic political climate that has fomented in America over our involvement in Middle Eastern nation-building. Ramsey is emphatic once again that politics had no effect on his decision to re-enlist, and he even goes so far as to say that he thinks it may have been a mistake to have invaded Iraq. “I think Afghanistan was the right thing to do, but Iraq, I’m not so sure.”
But he has a message for opponents of the war who want an immediate pull out, citing the danger and logistical difficulty of moving that many troops in a potentially hostile environment. Besides that aspect, he added, “We’re there now, and we should try to leave the place better than we found it.”
He agreed that, for better or worse, the United States military appears to be embedding itself on a number of hardened, permanent bases, and that, however he may feel about the appropriate nature of the original endeavor, “It doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere.”
He is concerned, too, about the drumbeat for war with Iran. He suspects that the President’s troop surge, scheduled to come home next summer, will most probably end up staying longer due to the increasing tensions. He questions, however, some of the evils being attributed to supposed Iranian meddling in Iraqi sectarian squabbling. Most of the so-called insurgents he encountered in his time there appeared to be from the North Africa Muslim world, from countries such as Egypt.
“The war on terror is everywhere,” he explained. “It isn’t just one country against another. It could be anybody, anywhere.” He shrugs, an implication, perhaps, that this is a more complex conflict than the current saber-rattling between sovereign nations would suggest.
Geopolitical circumstances aside, Ramsey will live on with the memories—and the wounds—of his service. He’s even sustained a new kind of injury here at home—being attacked by youthful anti-war zealots. “Somebody slapped me at a party,” he claimed, merely because the woman found out he had served in the military.
Ramsey is dismissive, however, of the grievous and inappropriate insult he endured. The woman who slapped him, he said, was intoxicated and “misinformed.”
“I wasn’t over there because of politics,” he reminded me, “but she didn’t want to hear it. I told her, you’re screaming at me now, but the reason you’re free to say the things you’re saying is because I went and did my job.”
His tormentor left soon after that, especially when Ramsey informed her that the party host had also served in the USMC. “That was brave of her,” he said sarcastically. “But you know, I also meet plenty of people who want to hug me and thank me for having been a Marine, so it doesn’t matter.”
The trade-off for his mild physical infirmities (and the occasional, ungrateful fellow countryman) is that, at 27, Ramsey is in a position to follow whichever path he wishes, whatever dreams may come to him. If, at the moment, this patriotic young man seems a touch uncertain of what direction to take, it has less to do with disillusionment over his experiences serving his country than the dashing of his hope to have had a career in the service like his father before him, a retired Navy commander—but this dream is now, unfortunately, not possible to realize.
But one aspect of his life is a certainty no matter what occurs: “Whatever I end up doing,” he declared at the conclusion of our interview, “I’ll never not be a United States Marine.”
He looked back at me and added with a wistful tone, “As a matter of fact, my unit shipped back out just last night.” I asked him if, given the chance, he would be with those Marines right now. “Yeah, I would. I wish I could.”
Ramsey turned to go into the waning Carolina summer light, then, a warrior now only in spirit—but what a courageous, patriotic spirit indeed.
Ellie
One Marine's Story
Published in News & Commentary
By James D. McCallister
Lance Corporal Daniel Ramsey (USMC—ret.) has been a friendly, recognizable face around Five Points for a long while now, but when I ran into him on the Avenue a few months ago, I realized it had been quite some time since he’d been hanging around the coffee shop, a favorite haunt for as long as I have known him.
I asked Dan what he’d been up to since I had last seen him. “I just got out of the Marines,” he replied. “I got hurt.”
Since I knew he’d already served a late-90’s stint in the Navy as a Seabee, I was surprised to hear that he’d rejoined the service, particularly in light of the danger of doing so in these politically volatile times. Ramsey’s reasons, though, were far from political in nature—not only did he come from a military family background, but once the U.S. invaded Iraq, he said he felt a “calling” to do what he could to help.
“A couple of my friends got killed on that first push into Baghdad,” he explained. “When that happened, I thought to myself, there’s something I need to do. I need to get back in the fight.” His decision was about more than just getting into combat, however. “I also thought that, if I do this, then maybe somebody else, some young kid, won’t have to.”
Ramsey understood that, with his prior military experience, he could be a good influence on troops who would be almost uniformly younger than him. Even though he was only twenty-four at the time of his reenlistment, he says, “I got called ‘grandpa’ a lot. Out of a few hundred guys, I was the oldest.”
He could have easily resumed his Naval career, but he figured that if he were to sign back up, he would go for the gusto, so to speak, and become a Marine infantry rifleman. After going through basic training at Parris Island (no, you don’t get to skip that part just because of prior service), he was stationed first at Camp Geiger in North Carolina for infantry training, then later Camp Lejune.
It wasn’t long before his unit, part of the 2nd Marine Division, was deployed. But Ramsey did’t immediately find himself in the Middle East.
“I was part of an MEU (Marine Expeditionary Unit) stationed off West Africa on the (USS) Gunston Hall,” a Whidby Island-class docking/landing ship. In this period of his service, he was working with Spanish, British, and Italian marines paying what were in essence goodwill visits to various African countries, “making friends,” he says, with homegrown military units, visiting dignitaries, and the like.
Most of his missions overseas, whether in Iraq or otherwise, remain classified operations that he is unable to describe in any significant detail, including what he refers to as a number of “incidents” in the Africa countries he visited.
I wondered about the obviously covert nature of such activities, but Ramsey explained that the USMC is different: Unlike the other branches of the service, which require the assent of congress to be deployed on missions, “We [Marines] serve at the pleasure of the Commander-in-Chief. All the president has to do is point at a map and we go.”
After the West African stint, his unit found themselves in Jordan, on a mission to assist in the training of Jordanian police and military personnel.
It wasn’t long before the firepower and training of Ramsey’s unit were needed across the border, however: First, an entire platoon of snipers were sent into Iraq, and shortly thereafter the rest of the unit was ordered to cross into the active war zone, to fight in areas like Faluja and Ramadi, names now all too familiar to those who have followed the U.S. war effort in Iraq.
It was during these combat operations that Ramsey found himself engaged in a number of challenging situations. While again eschewing specifics, he said he was just doing the job that Marines are routinely sent to do: to engage and destroy the enemy, clearing the way for other military units to come in and do their various jobs, be it further combat, or otherwise.
Ramsey is not so gung-ho that he revels in his time while in the active fire zone. “I did things that I’m not proud of,” he says. When pressed to elaborate—I asked him quite specifically if he knew that he had killed anyone—he indicated that he doesn’t necessarily mean that he ever took any improper action, only that he participated in what would best be described as the standard ugliness of warfare. “But I try not to think about that too much.”
I asked him how the Iraqi people appeared to receive the American troops. “From what I could see, they loved us—but it could have been the fact that we were handing out free stuff, stuff they needed. We were giving them food and water, which they desperately needed, and candy—the kids especially seemed to love us.”
Ramsey’s training included general directions so as not to offend the Muslim culture, but when asked about religious affiliation of the indigenous population he encountered, he replied that he had no idea, and suggested that basic human needs such as hunger apparently cut across ethnic and sectarian lines.
It was in July of 2006, after he and his squad were once again sent across the border, that Ramsey found himself suddenly injured—though as fate would have it, his difficulty arose not from a combat wound, but from an occurrence as prosaic as a traffic accident.
“We were hauling ass along the side of a road, up on a slope,” he said of a route designed to avoid IEDs and other potentially ruinous obstacles on the road below.
But rather than enemy activity, it was a simple oversight that would effectively end what he now hoped was to be a lifelong career in the service of his country.
“The driver forgot to put in one small pin in the tailgate of the vehicle, one that actually helps hold the entire side on.” When that same driver swerved sharply to avoid an object on the hillside, the entire body of the vehicle unexpectedly flew open, and Ramsey, along with three other infantrymen, flew out onto the ground. “I landed on my forehead going forty miles an hour. And with all my gear on, I probably weighed two hundred and thirty pounds, even though I was only about 180 at the time. The last thing I remember seeing were my heels flying over my head—it was strange.”
Ramsey’s compatriots weren’t badly hurt in the accident, but he was—though the severity and extent of the injuries would not become apparent for some time. “I looked like the Elephant Man—a huge lump on my head, scrapes, bruises. I had numbness in my hands. My neck was in bad shape.” He doesn’t remember too many details after hitting the ground, but his buddies in the squad said Ramsey’s Marine training never seemed to desert him: As he lay injured on the hard, unforgiving ground, he was primarily concerned with ascertaining the whereabouts of his weapon.
His injuries were obviously too delicate to be handled by a field medic, and Ramsey was sent to the closest facility that could accommodate him, which in his case happened to be the Prince of Jordan’s personal hospital. “I even met the Prince,” Ramsey smiled. “But I don’t really remember it.”
As regal as the facility might sound, the equipment found therein was far from state of the art. As a result, the damage to his neck was not accurately diagnosed, though he didn’t realize it at the moment. “They said I had a severe neck sprain, and gave me pain medication.”
He was back on his feet the next day, and then returned to his unit in spite of continuing to be in great discomfort. He was assigned what is known as “light duty,” which he explained means simply hanging back a bit while regaining the strength to return to the front lines, if necessary.
The respite was brief, however: Light duty, in his case, ended up being very dramatic indeed, as his unit was suddenly redeployed to assist with yet another incipient Middle Eastern crisis: The sudden evacuation of the 25,000 Americans living in Lebanon, necessitated by the open warfare that had unexpectedly erupted between Israel and Hezbollah.
I asked him if any of the refugees noticed his facial injuries, which were still fairly extensive and fresh at the time of this sudden mission. “Not really. They were mostly happy to just be getting out of Lebanon. Rockets were landing nearby.”
Time passed, and while his cosmetic injuries healed, he continued to suffer from severe pain, “about a seven out of ten,” he reports, even with generous quantities of medication. (He would later discover that he had developed an ulcer from the large doses of ibuprofen given to him by medics, though as he found out, this unpleasant condition was the least of his problems.)
Ramsey said that, after two months of distress, “They finally started realizing that I wasn’t getting any better. I would drop things out of my hands, I couldn’t get out of bed.”
Being stationed on a ship, his bunk was part of a stack of five other, narrow beds, and he found himself almost unable to get in and out of his cramped personal space. Ramsey then began what became a Byzantine medical odyssey, along which he discovered that the answers to his problems were neither easy nor forthcoming.
He went to Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, even Baghdad in search of the MRI equipment necessary to accurately diagnose his injuries—but none of the facilities had the capability he needed. Finally, he was slated to be transported to the U. S. Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany for an extensive MRI.
The flight from Kuwait, on a cargo plane filled with burned and wounded soldiers, was a grim journey indeed. “It was the saddest flight I’ve ever been on. I saw a lot of burn victims. When you get hit by a bomb or an IED, you get burned.” One soldier, incinerated from head to toe, even died in transit.
And Ramsey, in spite of his pain, couldn’t help but feel guilty among his fellow soldiers—these were the true war-wounded, with missing limbs and other horrendous, acute injuries. “But by then, you couldn’t even tell by looking at me that I was hurt. I felt like an *******.”
But hurt Ramsey was: The extent of his neck injuries became clear once a proper MRI was performed, and it was discovered that he had two smashed discs in his neck, a condition made worse by the lag time between the accident and the proper diagnosis. At that point, it was decided that the treatment he required necessitated a trip back stateside.
“It wasn’t until I got back (to Camp Lejune) that a doctor finally said what had really happened.” The hairs on his arms stand up at the memory. “I’ll never forget that day. They said I had broken my neck.”
As it turned out, when he struck the ground his head had apparently snapped all the way back, and the subsequent bone injuries had calcified in the lengthy interim since the accident.
Ramsey was prescribed a regimen of physical therapy, but he found out that to repair the damage to the vertebrae in his neck, he would need surgery to fuse the bones together with a four-inch titanium plate. The operation was a success, though Ramsey will continue to have limited movement in his neck for the rest of his life. He is unable to turn his head to the right, or to look upwards without leaning back.
“I’ve also got nerve damage,” he added, describing numbness in his fingers, muscle twitching, and disrupted sleep. “I get an hour here and an hour there,” he said with a rueful smile. “Maybe four hours total a night.”
His experiences as a medically-disabled veteran bear out the complaints others have made about the VA system of health care for our returning combat veterans.
“The problem is that they won’t tell you what you need to know. You have to know what to ask for,” he says of the various medical benefits, follow up treatment, and so on (a function, no doubt, of the entrenched bureaucracy that reportedly plagues the VA and other federal government agencies).
Overall, though, Ramsey is happy with his experience in the military. He has money to go to college (after his experiences rehabbing from his injuries, he is considering a career in physical therapy), and he will have a lifetime pension and medical care no matter what he ends up doing for a career.
Inevitably, perhaps, our discussion turned to the toxic political climate that has fomented in America over our involvement in Middle Eastern nation-building. Ramsey is emphatic once again that politics had no effect on his decision to re-enlist, and he even goes so far as to say that he thinks it may have been a mistake to have invaded Iraq. “I think Afghanistan was the right thing to do, but Iraq, I’m not so sure.”
But he has a message for opponents of the war who want an immediate pull out, citing the danger and logistical difficulty of moving that many troops in a potentially hostile environment. Besides that aspect, he added, “We’re there now, and we should try to leave the place better than we found it.”
He agreed that, for better or worse, the United States military appears to be embedding itself on a number of hardened, permanent bases, and that, however he may feel about the appropriate nature of the original endeavor, “It doesn’t look like we’re going anywhere.”
He is concerned, too, about the drumbeat for war with Iran. He suspects that the President’s troop surge, scheduled to come home next summer, will most probably end up staying longer due to the increasing tensions. He questions, however, some of the evils being attributed to supposed Iranian meddling in Iraqi sectarian squabbling. Most of the so-called insurgents he encountered in his time there appeared to be from the North Africa Muslim world, from countries such as Egypt.
“The war on terror is everywhere,” he explained. “It isn’t just one country against another. It could be anybody, anywhere.” He shrugs, an implication, perhaps, that this is a more complex conflict than the current saber-rattling between sovereign nations would suggest.
Geopolitical circumstances aside, Ramsey will live on with the memories—and the wounds—of his service. He’s even sustained a new kind of injury here at home—being attacked by youthful anti-war zealots. “Somebody slapped me at a party,” he claimed, merely because the woman found out he had served in the military.
Ramsey is dismissive, however, of the grievous and inappropriate insult he endured. The woman who slapped him, he said, was intoxicated and “misinformed.”
“I wasn’t over there because of politics,” he reminded me, “but she didn’t want to hear it. I told her, you’re screaming at me now, but the reason you’re free to say the things you’re saying is because I went and did my job.”
His tormentor left soon after that, especially when Ramsey informed her that the party host had also served in the USMC. “That was brave of her,” he said sarcastically. “But you know, I also meet plenty of people who want to hug me and thank me for having been a Marine, so it doesn’t matter.”
The trade-off for his mild physical infirmities (and the occasional, ungrateful fellow countryman) is that, at 27, Ramsey is in a position to follow whichever path he wishes, whatever dreams may come to him. If, at the moment, this patriotic young man seems a touch uncertain of what direction to take, it has less to do with disillusionment over his experiences serving his country than the dashing of his hope to have had a career in the service like his father before him, a retired Navy commander—but this dream is now, unfortunately, not possible to realize.
But one aspect of his life is a certainty no matter what occurs: “Whatever I end up doing,” he declared at the conclusion of our interview, “I’ll never not be a United States Marine.”
He looked back at me and added with a wistful tone, “As a matter of fact, my unit shipped back out just last night.” I asked him if, given the chance, he would be with those Marines right now. “Yeah, I would. I wish I could.”
Ramsey turned to go into the waning Carolina summer light, then, a warrior now only in spirit—but what a courageous, patriotic spirit indeed.
Ellie