Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(63)
When I returned home on June 21, 2003, I called the USO immediately and asked where I could go next.
Two weeks later, I was on another USO trip, this time to Italy, visiting US troops stationed there.
Late August, early September 2003, I found myself in Germany with the USO, visiting troops at various bases around the country and also at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, the main overseas hospital where soldiers wounded in Iraq or Afghanistan received medical care before being flown back to the States.
When I came home from Germany, a week later I visited troops at Fort Stewart and Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia, home of the Third Infantry Division, who’d done much of the work to take Saddam International Airport. My brother-in-law Jack had met my wife’s sister, Amy, while serving at Fort Stewart, so I asked Jack to come with me on that trip.
Two days later, on September 11, 2003, two years after the terrorist attacks on our country, I walked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center and National Naval Medical Center at Bethesda for the first time, meeting wounded troops in both hospitals in one day. At Walter Reed, I met a soldier wheeling himself down the hallway whom I’d seen two weeks earlier at Landstuhl. Back in Germany he was fresh off the line, unable to get out of bed. Now in Washington, DC, he was able to get around in a wheelchair. It felt good to see progress.
A few weeks after that, in October, I visited troops at the Naval Base Coronado in San Diego. The USO set up a trip for me where I drove myself down and said hello to the troops at the base and boarded the aircraft carrier USS John Stennis and took pictures and signed autographs aboard ship. My wife and kids joined me on this trip, and they loved meeting the troops and seeing me at work supporting them.
Then in early November 2003, I flew with the USO overseas again with Wayne Newton, Chris Isaak, Neal McCoy, and a couple of Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, this time visiting troops at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates, returning for a second time to Camp Doha, and visiting more troops in Kuwait and at Camp Anaconda / Balad Air Base in Iraq.
All told, I’d taken six trips in six months.
On each trip, I felt a new surge of adrenaline. I wanted to help the troops so badly. My goal was to spread out as far as I could, as fast as I could.
I don’t think anyone back then could have possibly known what lay ahead for our military in the war against terror. How long the wars would last. How brutal they would become.
As years went on and the wars continued in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fighting became harder for coalition forces. Before I’d left for my first USO trip, the president had already given his now-infamous speech under a banner that read “Mission Accomplished” on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln. That happened on May 1, 2003, but clearly the mission was far from over. President Bush had never himself uttered the words “mission accomplished,” and he’d clearly stated during that speech that “our mission continues,” and “we have difficult work to do in Iraq,” but the damage had been done by that banner. Controversy swelled back home in America, and more of our troops were getting hurt overseas. I would continue to make trips to the war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan to meet our fighting men and women in a variety of places and under many different circumstances. On one of my trips, I visited a small combat unit stationed at a forward operating base in Habbaniyah, Iraq. The day I arrived, there was sadness and tension and anger in the unit. The day before, a sniper had killed one of their buddies, and they were all eager to find the terrorist and bring justice to him. This was simply one day in Iraq for just one of our units living in a combat zone. They would live with this death, and surely many others, for the rest of their lives. Each time I heard this kind of news my heart broke. I felt for these warriors, and I so desperately didn’t want any controversy surrounding this current conflict to spill over and hurt our troops or their families. I didn’t want to see these wars turn into another Vietnam, where our defenders were forgotten. They would have a difficult enough time returning home with the scars and wounds of war. I wanted our servicemen and -women to know people still backed them up, and I wanted to do everything in my power to help them stay strong.
News reports from the war in Iraq were seldom good, and I still feared for America, for my family, and for what the future held. In 2003, Sophie turned fifteen, Mac turned thirteen, and Ella turned eleven. I was spending a lot of time away from my family, but Moira and our kids told me how much they supported what I was doing. With Vietnam vets in her family, Moira knew how important it was. I think my wife and children knew that by letting me go, they also helped in the effort. They wanted us as a family, as Americans, to do whatever we could.
And then there were the hospitals.
I did not have good feelings about hospitals.
Back when I was nineteen years old, smoking finally caught up to my mom’s mom, Grandma Millie. I loved Grandma Millie; she was fun and loved that I acted in plays. She was diagnosed with emphysema and lung cancer and went into the hospital, where she quickly lost a lot of weight. With the exception of being born in one, and having my tonsils removed when I was five, I’d never spent any time in a hospital before, and I wanted to visit her. But I was scared. I’d seen death only once before, and I hated it.
When I was about nine years old, my grandpa Les had contracted Buerger’s disease, where blockages occurred in the blood vessels of his feet and hands. Grandpa Les had lived with his mother then, a staunch Christian Science follower who didn’t believe in doctors. One of Grandpa’s toes literally fell off, and with a rubber band his mother tried to put it back on and hold it there so it would heal. He died slowly, wasting away bit by bit, a horrible death for anyone to endure.