A scout with (last I asked him) the Seventh Infantry, Billy has been through the thick and thin of our most recent, two-headed war on terror. Shot a few times, and blown up a couple more, he will tell you that body armor works, and that war sucks, generally speaking.
If most U.S. Soldiers are anything like my nephew, then I feel pretty good about us. Billy is a fine young man who has taken his training seriously, and been over for more tours of duty than any of us would dream of taking.
With four months left on this tour, he paces a small encampment daily, fighting the reality between extreme boredom, or the pure, undiluted excitement of being under attack by a dedicated guerrilla force that the CIA trained nearly forty years ago when they wanted to run the Russians out of their country.
In the pictures we see of Billy lately, he has matured into a real, steely-eyed fighting man; a leader of others like himself; someone dedicated to getting your son or daughter back home to you in one piece, should training and good luck hold out.
The idea that I could sit here and have an online chat with a front line soldier is a sign of the times we live in. Seventy years ago, my uncles and grandfathers were in a war that left loved ones back home to wonder about the fate of their sons, especially in the face of headlines that spoke of places like Normandy, or Iwo Jima; headlines that left the reader waiting for the casualty list to follow.
These boys have done so much for all of us. I just hope that the rest of us can pull our shit together and get this nation rolling again when they come back home. What a tragic shame it would be to send our young off to war and not offer them a fighting chance when they return without their youth or innocence.
We talked about the future, what he plans for the next few years. His wife Amada, who also served and now takes on the roll of mother as well, is going back to school while Billy, most likely will re-enlist…again. Billy is good at what he does.
Most of us will never have to know what war is like. Kids like Billy get to take that job for us. That’s why whenever I see a kid in uniform I stop and shake their hand, or buy that soda they are holding in the check out aisle. I just want that kid, all of them really, to know that most of us are thinking about them all the time; that even though this world seems to keep on spinning along, we are remembering them as they do their jobs, jobs that most of us would not wish to fill.
So I’m hoping that when Billy gets home in four months that he can stay home, even if only to start teaching new kids how to do what he, and all those like him, have already done. It is young men like Billy that keep the fires of democracy burning for all of us.
