No Man is an Island

Posting the previous week’s assignment:

It could well have been a tragic scene out of a Hollywood movie. Unfortunately, it was quite real, and I was cast in the unexpected role of a lifetime.

The year was 1968. Too many young soldiers were returning from the Vietnam war in flag-draped coffins. I was in the OJT (on-the-job-training) phase of basic training at Fort Polk, LA. I had a boring desk job that would last for a several weeks before returning to the safety of my home in CT, where I planned to complete a Masters Degree in English and seek a teaching job.

One early morning, a staff sergeant entered our barracks and read off a list of six names for a “special duty.” As one of those six, I soon learned that we were to form an honor guard for the funeral of a
19-year-old soldier (just three years younger than I).

Dressed in a borrowed light-weight dress uniform (my wool suit – standard issue in CT – was clearly unsuitable for 90 degree heat), I boarded a bus to our destination. The trip to Lake Charles and back is now a lost memory, but the funeral left an indelible series of images. The procession of bereaved family members and friends was the most pathetic array of characters I’d ever seen. Each face was unique – etched with sorrow befitting the somber occasion. But there was more than the burden of a loss. These were individuals stooped by a greater suffering, weighed down by life’s cruel hand. Tall, short, old, young, that procession was a microcosm of a nation coming to grips with the reality and inevitability of war…of good and bad…of right and wrong…of success and failure.

The soldier who had given his life for his country was honored with the military’s traditional 21-gun salute. On command, seven rifles fired three times. The silence in between each shattering volley was a distinct echo of the simultaneous shots, followed by the quiet command to reload and fire again. While close enough to hear the commands to “fire,” my body still jerked with surprise to the sound of each round – no less the third time than the one before. The last echo seemed to linger in the still air, as if on command, until long after the bereaved had trudged back to their cars and departed.

I felt a finality in those rifle shots, not unlike a shovel full of rocks and dirt crashing on a wood coffin below. And, while I didn’t know the deceased, that day we were as close as brothers. He was a young man, a soldier, a patriot, a citizen of the world. That day, I felt in my heart what John Donne had meant by: “Ask not for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.”

Marc Sacher
March 15, 2017