In 2001 I was still in the US Navy, working on finishing up my first decade of service. I was serving with an agency known as Joint Task Force-Full Accounting at the time, acting as a translator and analyst for teams scouring southeast asia for missing and POWs from the VN conflict. It was a wonderful and very rewarding job that equally had its ups and downs: I was hospitalized several times during my stint there, coming down with everything from Typhus to falling and cracking a bunch of bones as I bounced down the side of a mountain.
The satisfying humanitarian piece aside, I learned a lot from being a part of that mission, from public speaking - nothing like learning to speak in front of audiences like doing it in foreign language that you are not really that good at: in the beginning at least. It was a trial by fire - to learning how to study people, motivate them and large groups to get a task done. My favorite was 18 days I spent on the side of a mountain, way up in the jungle, keeping the 17 people on my team and the hundred or so locals from lynching one another. We managed to get the job done but issues on both sides so complicated things that it was a wonder we succeeded. Keeping everyone talking, working and from exploding left me with little sleep, tried patience, and a hoarse voice but a strong satisfaction as well. Of course, it was also one of the 4 month stints where I ended up getting medevaced out later but hey, you can't have everything!
Why I bring this up today is because today is a special day. In 2001 on this day one of our helicopters crashed while departing after a long but productive mission. You can read about it here: http://www.check-six.com/Crash_Sites/2001-JTFFA-Mi17.htm. It was a black day for us, the 100 or so of us that worked this mission. We lost 16 people that day; 7 of them people I had just worked with only days prior and had worked with often in the months beforehand. As powerful as it was to all of us, it was very personal to me and served as the marker in which I went back to the USN and told them it was time to do something different. I had laid down 7 years to that mission, wonderful, powerful years where I learned a lot but it was time to do something different. Events had been building up towards my departure anyway but the incident and the grounding afterwards of the mission propelled it along faster.
The Navy, not beholden to listening to young NCOs told me to shut up and color. I, in true fashionable response to what I considered stupidity, took my crayons somewhere else. In this case, the USAF. There I traded my crayons for a digital set that led me to writing missile simulators and chasing after digital criminals in a DOD criminal forensics center.
It was, in any way I can look at it, the best outcome. So, to get back on topic, its really not about me today. Its about a couple of men who gave up their lives while trying to do the right thing - to bring home those who have been lost during the peril of war and bring final settlement to the families who still look to the night with a hope that resolution, no matter how painful, isn't lost.
