Day 88, Walk for Warriors

The monitor on my laptop lit up the inside of my truck with a blue yahoo glow as I brewed the first of several cups of coffee. This morning felt cooler at 4:00AM than most mornings lately so I was encouraged that an early start meant good conditions for the walk. The oatmeal tasted suspiciously like detergent which it tends to when I’m feeling more like a waffle and eggs. I forced it down with raisins and a healthy swirl of honey.

My conversations with folks down here seem to drift towards their depression over the Oil Spill. I enjoyed talking to a teacher who with her husband and son has been using their fishing boat to help in the offshore side of the clean up in local Alabama waters. She told me her men keep telling her to stop crying when they’re out on the water but she says she can’t stop. “I just go down below decks and pretend I’m grabbing equipment and I let the tears flow.”

The teacher's husband is an iron worker so she says the hot work out on the water doesn’t bother him. She is an elementary school teacher back home. They are getting paid by some fund but the teacher says the work is very hard and dirty and equally depressing because of the magnitude of the oil mass. “Sometimes we see long strands of red oil floating like small islands. We’re doing the best we can but it is tough going.” She and her husband have just finished the one month mark down here in Baldwin County.

I arrived at a public parking lot at the beach in Perdido. An old surfer, dripping wet, walked to his car in his bare feet over the coral like gravel covering the lot. He looked like a man passing the hot coal test. His board, however was still in its cover latched to the top of his car.

“No surf this morning?” I asked.

“No, I thought there would be something from that storm off to the west but it didn’t happen.”

The back of my truck was open so I could change shoes. He looked in and saw the catastrophe inside with all my gear and refuse. “You’ve been doing some serious traveling I can see,” he said.

“I have been doing some serious walking across the country.”

“No kidding?”

“I’m just about finished with a two thousand mile walk for Fisher House and the families of wounded vets.”

We got to talking about the walk and he was extremely interested in my methods and my shoes. I showed him a couple of pairs and then I put on my boots which he took to be very special. “My name is Ken, by the way.” I shook his hand and told him my name and gave him a Fisher House card. “Let me take a look at those fancy boots,” he said as he inspected the black bombers.

“I don’t use them much but today I wanted more support for my arches.”

“I’m a long haul trucker. Man, I’ll never get rid of this gut unless I start doing something like this,” he said as he grabbed rolls of fat in both hands.

“The gut is the last thing to go,” I said which I’m sure buoyed his spirits.

“I hear that. Just look at this thing.” I couldn’t miss it, of course, Ken was standing in his bathing suit, fresh out of the water. We talked about walking and surfing and how his job is driving and eating, and more driving and more eating. I assured him that many occupations are lousy, then I marched off toward the bridge east of Gulf Shores.

Today was the Day of Prayer for Alabama as designed by Governor Riley. Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi joined in to “ask for God’s blessings” as Governor Riley framed the message. In talking with so many people from these states, it is clear that there is a massive state of depression that the spill happened, that nothing is being allowed to be done, and that nobody has stepped in to say, “Let’s roll up our sleeves now. I am here to help y’all get ‘er done.” The emotion is absolutely palpable when you meet people from Brownsville to Pensicola. Everyone wanted to help in some way but they were sad, and the frustration was building.

During the walk I noticed several Navy pilot types running along my route. These were all clean cut, well chiseled men wearing Navy caps and T-shirts and many sported camel-backs for hydration. Naval aviation is a big part of this area’s identity and I can see that they have wonderful local support.

One couple here at the KOA spent the whole day at the Pensicola Aviation Museum. The husband warned me after our conversation, “If you got a gun leave it here because they will arrest you if they find it in your vehicle. They pulled one guy over and hauled him off.”

I told him that if I got the chance I would check out the museum and stow my pistol with the management here if they allowed me to. He added, “We’re from Texas so naturally we have guns with us at all times. I’m glad I thought of taking care of that before we went to the base today.”

My routine in Lillian has been to complete my walk, shower, get some lunch then drive over to Gulf Shores on U.S. 98 and Cr 20. Going west on 98 is a treat because it is so beautiful. There are specialty farms growing blueberries, making local cheeses, and farmer’s markets selling everything from herbs to watermelons. And there are brackish creeks to pass over with mysterious black waters that drain slowly into the many local bays and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Signs offer Pier Construction, Deep Sea Fishing, Specialty Welding, and Massage.

On Cr 20 you can stop in for a quick tanning session. I would not recommend it though because the structure is a metal A-frame. I envision the owner asking, “You got your clothes off yet cause I’m about to flip the switch.”

I think a better use of the building would be to irradiate produce on the way home from the outdoor markets. A tanning booth would work just fine to cut down on the cases of salmonella poisoning. The customer could throw her produce into the A-frame and the proprietor would yell, “Fire in the hole.”

Emotions run strong as families prepare for the deployment of loved ones to a war zone. The New York Times is running a series on how families and individuals cope with an impending deployment. Here is an excerpt I found fascinating:

A YEAR AT WAR

One Battalion’s Wrenching Deployment to Afghanistan
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Sgt. Brian Keith with his wife, Sara, and their son, Stephen, 6 months, just before Sergeant Keith deployed to Afghanistan with other troops from Fort Drum, N.Y.

By JAMES DAO
Published: June 26, 2010

Pvt. Johnnie Stevenson spent his final hours at Fort Drum alone, trying to put his game face on. He played some Ludacris on his iPod, then turned it off. He unpacked his 72-hour bag, then repacked it. Did he have enough toothpaste and spare socks? Had he paid his bills? Was he ready for war? For a year?

A Year at War
Leaving the Family Behind

This article is the first in a series chronicling the yearlong deployment of the First Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, based in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan. The series will chronicle the battalion’s part in the surge in northern Afghanistan and the impact of war on individual soldiers and their families back home.

Multimedia
Interactive Feature
A Year at War

Damon Winter/The New York Times
FLYING MILITARY CLASS From late March until mid-April, the First Battalion, 87th Infantry moved in waves through Germany, Kyrgyzstan and Kuwait to a small airstrip about 150 miles north of Kabul.

Capt. Adrian Bonenberger took a drive through the farmland of northern New York to absorb one last view of the St. Lawrence River. To drink one last cup of coffee at the Lyric Bistro in Clayton. To savor one last moment of real peace and quiet before heading to Afghanistan. For a year.

Sgt. Tamara Sullivan pulled out her cellphone charger and braced for a night of tears. She called her children in North Carolina, ages 3 and 1, and told them she would soon be going to work in a place called Afghanistan. For a year. She reminded her husband to send her their artwork. She cried, hung up, called him back and cried some more.

“I asked for him to mail me those pictures, those little sloppy ones,” she said. “I want to see what my children’s hands touched, because I won’t be able to touch them.”

These are the faces of the new American surge in Afghanistan. For the next year, the First Battalion, 87th Infantry of the 10th Mountain Division from Fort Drum, N.Y., will be living, working and fighting in the fertile northern plains of Afghanistan, part of the additional 30,000 troops who will make up the backbone of President Obama’s plan for ending the nine-year war.

The president said last week that the strategy — which calls for securing population centers, reducing civilian casualties and strengthening the Afghan police and army — would continue despite his firing the top Afghanistan war commander, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

In the increasingly restive provinces of Kunduz and Baghlan, the 1-87 will be opening a new front and waging a different kind of war. Its job will be to train the local police, secure a vital highway to Central Asia and expand the shaky writ of President Hamid Karzai’s government in the north.

The soldiers will be living with the police in mud-walled outposts and conducting daily foot patrols alongside them into contested areas. The goal is to build public support for the police — no simple task, given its reputation for corruption and ineffectiveness.

Over the course of the next year, The New York Times will be visiting the battalion to chronicle its part in the surge and explore the strains of deployment on soldiers, many fresh out of basic training, others on their fifth combat tour in nine years.

If their mission cannot succeed in the relatively stable north, the policy seems unlikely to work anywhere in Afghanistan.

The battalion is the first large American military unit to be based in these provinces since the war began, and the troops expect to be challenged by emboldened insurgent forces that have been ambushing police checkpoints, vandalizing schools, mining roads and extorting merchants with growing regularity.

Lt. Col. Russell Lewis, the battalion commander, said that for most of the war, troops with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had not seriously contested Taliban-controlled areas in the north. That, he said, is about to change.

The battalion, which began moving to Afghanistan in March, will be joined by late summer by an aviation brigade with transport and assault helicopters that will allow them to conduct missions deep into insurgent strongholds, which fuels talk of a possible offensive by fall.

“It will get hotter before it gets better,” Colonel Lewis said.

The deployment will also test the emotional mettle of soldiers and their families. Across eight time zones and 6,500 miles, linked by the fragile threads of the Internet and cellular technology, those soldiers will counsel children, comfort parents, manage marriages and mourn deaths back home, even as they struggle with loneliness, boredom and fear in Afghanistan.

They are almost all men, with a small attachment of women in noninfantry jobs. Many are begging to see combat. Others dread the prospect.

Specialist Samuel Michalik, a 24-year-old, single infantryman from Tennessee on his first deployment, offered one perspective.

“I think it’s safe to say that most people would want to see some action — they don’t want to be there and just be sitting around,” he said before the deployment.

“If it’s my time to die or get injured, whatnot, I think then, God’s going to allow that. I’m at peace with that.”

Sgt. First Class Brian Eisch, a 35-year-old single parent of two boys from Wisconsin, also on his first deployment, voiced a different view.

“If we are here for a year and don’t fire one round, I’m happy,” the sergeant said. “I’ve got two boys waiting for me that I want to go back home and be a dad to.”

©2010 John Van Dyke Cote’
All Rights Reserved

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