He stood there looking over the more than 6400 flags flying in the fading light of sunset. There was a flag in that field for every soldier who had died the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was a flag there for his best friend; there was almost a flag there for him.
I could tell there was something going on deep inside him by the look in his eyes. He stood there with a camera around his neck but he was not taking any pictures. There was a big brace on his right knee. We made eye contact a couple of times before I came over to him and I had the sense that he did not really want to go through what he was experiencing alone. I walked over and struck up a conversation and his story began to flow out.
He and a friend, had been through multiple deployments in Iraq. They were in the lead vehicle in a convoy on what should have been a simple mission. It would be the last mission that he and his friend would go on before they shipped out for home. Things were going fine, then they were hit by an IED.
What he remembers is sketchy. But he knew his friend was dead, nearly cut in half. He knew he was badly hurt himself. What he didn't remember was his own journey of months in a coma in a military hospital in Germany. His wife flying there because he wasn't expected to make it. He did not understand but he was told that he had a traumatic brain injury. There would be many things that happened after he awakened that he did not remember. Many of those things - it was good he did not.
He had come to this field to remember his friend and to take a picture. "I can't take a picture of this, it doesn't feel right to do that. It would not capture what I feel here," he said. "There is something of my friend here. Almost something sacred," and then he stood in silence for a moment.
He looked to the large white cross in the middle of the field and said, "It is right that the cross is there in the middle of all this. It is the only thing that helps it all make any sense." He told me about his faith in Christ, how he had strayed away from the faith after his first deployment, "I had killed people, some were just kids, I did not feel right. I walked away from God." Now he confessed, he could not walk through life without Him.
It struck me as he said that, that there is whole new meaning to the "power of the cross" that I had not thought of before. It was a memorial marker for a sacrifice and a death, like all the flags, but that one death had the power to change all these other deaths and sacrifices.
He told me more about his friend, how his friend's father had been in the military and had been killed in the first Gulf War and now his friend was dead and had no family left behind. He cried. I tried to pray for him and cried too.
We both somehow got through the moment. He got on his bus and rode back to where he was staying. As I walked away, I knew this Memorial Day would be different. He had given me something to remember...a lot to remember.
For the journey...
Tim
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