I always wanted to be in the military. No doubt about it. From playing soldier as a kid, to spending six of my teenage years in the Navy Sea Cadet Program. From there I went on to attend Norwich University, one of the senior military academies in the country, to pursue a mechanical engineering degree, commission as an officer in the Navy, and play on the Rugby team. I went on to graduate and commission… Oh wait, that didn’t happen. For many reasons, and no reason at all, I dropped out after struggling through my freshman year as a member of the corps of cadets, as an athlete, and as a student. I felt robbed, but I didn’t know of what. I began my enlistment process and left for the Marine Corps at 19 years old. The yellow footprints of Paris Island took me around the world and to far away distant lands.
In the mid to late summer of the next year, a sweet young child was born somewhere in the Philippines to a loving and caring family. Regardless of minimal worldly possessions, the child would be raised and loved with everything the mother had. But unawares to many, including the mother and infant, the rumblings of a storm began to brew in the vast emptiness of the South Pacific. What starts a gentle breeze in the wind? What brings the healing powers of water down to this earth? Does it have a beginning or an end? Wherever it began, it did just that. Such as the snowflake causes the avalanche.
The threshold is crossed from breeze to wind, and wind to gust. The thunder rolls and the lightening cracks the sky as the darkness gathers. Mother nature against father time; A child caught in-between. Will she make it out? The bursting of the damn brought death and destruction to all in its path and turned an island nation into a sea of bodies. It broke on the ill-fated island the way a fire rips through a field in late August. Somewhere amidst the chaos and confusion, the poor child lost her life. Maybe it was during, maybe it was after. I will never know. I wonder what she went through. Did she drown. Did she suffer. All of those poor souls. The storm gave no quarter and showed no discrimination.
As fate willed it, I saw the pain in the mother’s eyes. A fleeting glimpse over my shoulder sees the mother turn her back, wailing into the night, and board the plane. Never to see her child again. Our collision course ended at the mass grave. No marking or sign of her life exists there. I don’t know what her name was.
Why does anything happen that does? What was her beginning and end? As the wind howls in the night, the failing screams of lives lost are but a fleeting memory in the vastness of my destiny.
I know what human life can be reduced to. I’ve seen it at the very end. With lives so carelessly erased from this world, who is left to pick up the pieces. If you are the 911 force of the world, a supper hero to those who look at a US Marine in their time of greatest need, and you fail. What then. When it is your fault. What then.