Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(64)
I wasn’t terribly close to Grandpa Les, but I still cared about him greatly. Grandma Millie and Grandpa Les had divorced when I was young. After their first divorce they remarried each other, then divorced again, a tug-of-war relationship where feelings for each other rose and fell.
After the second divorce, we never saw Grandpa much, and his funeral was the first funeral I ever faced. I took a soldering gun and burned some lettering into a piece of wood. The message read, “I love you, Grandpa, love Gary,” and I showed it to Grandma Millie. When I arrived at the wake, the lid of the casket lay open. My grandmother had placed my message inside the lid. Grandpa Les was dressed in a suit, and with the embalming and makeup he looked okay. They buried him with the message from me inside his coffin.
Years later, when Grandma Millie went into the hospital, I still had these memories of how Grandpa Les had died, and my gut roiled at the thought of visiting her. But I screwed up my courage and went anyway. She’d tried to fix herself up for us, because she knew we were visiting that day, but one glance told me she was not doing well. Her arms were as thin as sticks, her fingers bony and gaunt. She’d withered away to maybe forty pounds, almost to nothing. She smiled, and we talked a bit, and when I hugged her to say goodbye, I couldn’t believe how light she felt in my arms. I loved her and hated to see her looking like that. Sadness filled me, and when I walked out of her hospital room, I felt heavy and unnerved. I never saw her again.
From that day onward, hospitals represented death to me. My belief was one-sided, I knew, faulty in its entirety, because hospitals can be places of healing and hope. But those beliefs weren’t part of me yet. If you showed me a hospital as a young man, I instantly started to sweat.
In 2003, on the USO trip I took to Germany, the ride from the hotel to Landstuhl seemed to last forever. I fidgeted in my bus seat, my hands clammy, my heart racing. What would I do when I saw the troops in the hospital? Seeing a skinny grandma was one thing. But what if a patient was missing arms and legs? What if I was taken to the burn unit? I wanted to be on this tour, but I didn’t know if I had what it took. I’d met wounded vets earlier at the DAV convention in 1994, but those vets had been living with their injuries for a long time. The vets I was set to meet this day would be fresh off the battlefield, their injuries raw, many still fighting for their lives.
Our bus stopped in front of Landstuhl, and I climbed down the steps. Right then, another bus pulled up, and we just stood and stared. A plane had just landed from Iraq. A dozen or more US Army and Navy medical personnel swarmed in and went to work. One by one, the service members were carried off the bus on stretchers. A battery of medical machinery came along with them, a bustle of hoses and tubes and IVs, and I could see each wounded service member’s face. Eyes closed. Mouths grim. Soon the bus was empty. I took a deep breath, looked at my USO escorts, and said, “Okay. Let’s go.”
Through the doors in Landstuhl, we walked to a big, open room full of wounded service members. Maybe thirty guys total were standing or sitting in chairs around the room. A few burns or cuts, a few sprains and splints, but nothing too bad. These were soldiers whose wounds weren’t life-threatening. These guys would be patched up and sent back to the battlefield.
All was quiet at first. Somber. I could smell the antiseptic. Feel the harshness of the fluorescent lights. A lot of these soldiers had thousand-yard stares. I wore a USO baseball cap and just stood there at first, not knowing how to get started. The silence felt uneasy, awkward. But I knew I needed to dive in. I needed to go to someone and introduce myself and say hello.
Just then, one of the wounded soldiers looked up. He looked straight into my face, broke out in a big grin, and exclaimed, “Lieutenant Dan!”
A dam broke. The other guys all looked at me and roused themselves. The ones who could walk crowded around me, and the whole mood in the room changed. Soldier after soldier introduced himself. They asked me questions about Forrest Gump, and I told them some funny stories. A USO rep had a Polaroid camera and started taking pictures of me with the guys, so I signed the backs of the Polaroids and handed them out.
Maybe half an hour passed. Not long. But when I left that room, I couldn’t help but notice how the mood in the room felt different. Now there was laughter. Joy. And I knew a change had occurred in me too. This first room full of banged-up service members had forced me to get outside of myself. They’d helped me focus on who I was truly there for—them, not me. It was a reminder that this trip was about lifting them up and not about my own fears. So, on the walk to the next ward, I told myself to stop thinking about how I felt and focus instead on how the troops felt. My job was to help relieve their pain, to help give them something else to think about, to help them heal, to spread a bit of cheer.
Other rooms proved more difficult. That day in Landstuhl I visited some severely wounded service members. One soldier was in a coma, not aware of my presence. Another soldier was so filled with painkillers he couldn’t lift his head off the pillow. I spoke with a man whose face had been burned. Another was missing an arm. Some of the wounded weren’t even soldiers, although they were casualties of war too.
The United Nations Headquarters in Baghdad had been blown up a few days earlier. The UN special representative to Iraq had been killed. A civilian had been meeting with the representative at the time of the bombing. He lay in a bed in a coma, missing both legs, and his adult-aged daughter sat with him, waiting for him to wake up. When I first walked into the room, she looked so sad, so filled with grief and exhaustion. But after I said hello and introduced myself, she managed a smile, and I sat with her while she shared his story with me. She worried because he didn’t know yet his legs were gone. A real-life Lieutenant Dan. Not on the front lines, but definitely a casualty of war.