This is the day I remember “The Best Years of Our Lives,” Shughart and Gordon, my father and uncles Bud and Eddie, Richard Golding, and the warriors who preceded them and the ones that followed.
It is also the day that greets me with knowing that I’m one in a complicated collection of storytellers, visual and written, that tries to inform and educate readers about what they may never see or experience.
Their stories bring me to tears, most of which I try to keep to myself and often fail in the retelling of that moment where grief and joy battle for dominance. When a connection forms between them and me, between me and the storyteller, or the protagonist, or the color of the sky as the scene moves across the day.
I consider myself lucky to have been part of the membership of newspapers when storytelling was important. So important that it was the opening breath of the day, when the size of headlines announced importance and photos above the fold became the visual anchor for what followed.
I remember those days, 1997, early in the web, when the Philadelphia Inquirer published Mark Bowden’s once-a-week installments of the battle of Mogadishu and reading in an early installment about Shughart and Gordon forcing their commanders to allow them to attempt the rescue of downed helicopter pilot Mike Durant. Medal of Honor for both. Posthumously.
The serialized telling eventually became a book and the movie “Blackhawk Down.”
A similar thing happens to U.S. Marine Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl when he volunteers to escort a fallen Marine home. More out of a sense of duty and a personal desire to become more of a participant in the stories of combat, a place he’d never been.
He kept a journal of the trip, logging his transformation and the people he touched and those who touched him. That journal was originally serialized in the San Francisco Chronicle before becoming “Taking Chance,” a movie accurately portraying the trip.
“Taking Chance” is available on HBO’s MAX.
The Rocky Mountain News, now gone, has four Pulitzers. Todd Heisler’s Pulitzer for photos accompanied reporter Jim Sheeler’s “Final Salute” special report, also a Pulitzer winner. Heisler’s simple composition, isolating on emotional peaks of warriors coming home for the last time, pulls away the barriers of observation and places us into every scene. So tight that the frames become claustrophobic, closing in on our ability to step away, compose ourselves, and return to our world.
The photos can be seen at the Pulitzer site.
This is the day when I think of my WWII family. A father floating in the Mediterranean Sea, his destroyer sitting at the bottom thanks to a German torpedo plane, his next assignment the Aleutian Islands in the North Pacific. Of Uncle Bud dropping donkeys to Merrill’s Marauders, and whatever it was that happened to Uncle Eddie that drove him to care for fragile, rare orchids while he drank himself into poverty and death.
Their stories are told in “The Best Years of Our Lives,” a 1946 film about warriors changed by conflict, coming back to homes changed by their absence, and being changed by their presence.
I wonder about Daniel, whose official military record doesn’t reflect the horrific stories he told me about roadside bombs, children, and fear.
Westerville High School students sat quiet yesterday during the school's Veterans Memorial. Not because teachers were standing sentinels, three to a section. They sat quiet as a Veteran of Foreign War member told them that they were about the same age as the warriors they were honoring when they went to war. As were their parents, and the parents before them.
In another generation, some of these students will be the veterans sitting in the gym, talking about their experiences, explaining how their lives were changed by the encounter with conflict and telling the new students about the day they were students sitting in those seats worrying about what was happening on their phones.
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