I thought I would take a break from my lawn equipment dilemmas for a day. Today was a day I spent mostly tinkering around the house and spending a lot of time on Hive and Discord. But not not all of it.
Some of it I spent, like many days of late reflecting on an event that happened many years ago.
Like most mornings, it started with me waking before the ass crack of dawn for my usual early morning drive to our units location at the beach on the base. It was supposed to be the usual morning physical training (PT) session, lots of cross fit style calisthenics (before cross fit was a thing) and most likely a long 5 mile run on the beach.
When we got there, we started getting together to warm up, our Platoon Sergeant, came out and told us to stop. We need to immediately go in change from PT attire to our fatigues. There had been a helicopter crash on base overnight in the swamp and we were need to help with recovery.
We changed, and began to immediately prepping our inflatable Zodiac boats. Loaded them onto a 5-ton truck, and headed to I am not sure where at the time on the base. The sun has finally come up, but I was in the back of a Hummer and coudn't see where we were going.
When we got to our destination, it was apparant we were not the first by far. Vehicles were scattered everywhere in a field off the side of the wooded swamp with people scurrying about. We were corraled into a quick brief.
It seemed that a CH-46 and AH-1 had collided with each over over a landing zone during the night and both had crashed in the swamp near the zone. There were already Marines and fire crash rescue personnel at the crash sites for the helicopter in the swamp. The boats would not be needed. A path had been cleared and boards had been laid down that created a make shift walkway to keep us from sinking into the mud. They had recovered two pilots alive and they had been taken to the hospital already by the time we arrived.
We would be helping with doing body identification and recovery.
I do not want to go into the gory details of the rest of the day. However the details of the rest of the day are what I have reflected on a great deal lately. In particular there was one indivdual that day who lost their life that I will call Corporal "S".
I think the reason I remember "S" more than most is that he was my age at the time. He was married and had a wife and two kids about the same age as my kid at the time. Even his physical features resembled mine.
He could have been me
I am not sure why it is only in the last year when I am idle that I spend time reflecting on this event. The counselor and I plan to explore this more, but frankly I rely more on myself for these breakthroughs.
It could be because I never had so much idle time on my hands until this last year. It is only this last year that I medically retired. Now that my health has been in decline, maybe it brings me back to reflecting on my own mortality more and the day I came face to face with it in "S"'s dead eyes.
You are usually supposed to learn something from a reflection, or at least advance from it. Honestly, I don't know if there is anything I have learned from this reflection. Maybe only confirmed what I already thought and just saying it out loud. Maybe I just finally needed to get it off my chest to someone else other than my wife.
I am not sure were I go with this now, but I do appreciate you reading.
Thanks,
Joe
Note: Image source Canva.com
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