Close this Window Tale #1: Passing Through Tale #2: Two Dreams Tale #3: Granddaddy & Me Tale #4: Three Days at Sunset Tale #5: My Father's Promise

Two Dreams & Other Tales Tale #4: Three Days at Sunset (excerpt) Arlington National Cemetery Virginia, July 2008   It was a warm, humid, and overcast day as we made our way down Eisenhower Drive. It was my mother and me walking hand-in-hand behind the caisson that was bearing my brother to his final resting place. Mom was dressed in black and I was wearing the dark blue full-dress uniform of a US Navy lieutenant commander. As an enlisted Marine, Randy wouldn't normally have been accorded full military honors, but he died in combat, making them appropriate. Besides the horse-drawn caisson, the procession included an escort platoon and a military band, which played as we walked, announcing the passage of a fallen hero.   At one point, we passed a tall silver pole topped by a round, black marker which announced our arrival at Section 59. On our previous trips to Arlington, this section had always been our destination. This time, though, we were going a little further. My gaze swept across the sea of white gravestones in that section, one of which bore the name of my father, Gunnery Sergeant James Dillard, USMC. Dad deployed with 1st Battalion, 8th Marines to Beirut in 1983. The 1/8 was part of a multinational force of Americans and French sent to serve as a buffer between warring factions. Certain local Muslim militias chose to view the presence of the peacekeepers as an occupation, and so the shooting began. On October 23, a suicide bomber crashed a truck laden with explosives into the Marine compound, destroying the barracks and killing more than 300 people, including 241 Americans, mostly Marines. Dad narrowly escaped that disaster, but fell just a few days later to a sniper near Beirut International Airport. On a late fall day that year, we had come to this place to bury him.   Now, we were doing it all again. Randy had deployed to Afghanistan three times in the six-plus years since September 11, 2001. On a hot, dusty road outside of Kandihar, his convoy was struck by one of those roadside bombs the Taliban used with devastating effect. While some of his mates survived with debilitating injuries, Randy never knew what happened to him. I realized the parallels between him and Dad were quite eerie. Both served in the Marines, rose to the rank of sergeant, fought in the Middle East, and died at the hands of men who claimed loyalty to Allah. Finally, both were killed without warning by people they never laid eyes on.   At first, I was angry, declaring that only a coward would kill with a remote-controlled bomb. I was then reminded that, as a US naval officer, I was part of a military machine that had an arsenal that could deal out death from tens, hundreds, and even thousands of miles away. Nowadays, we could fight whole wars without ever seeing the eyes of our enemy. We may have been more sophisticated and efficient at it than the Taliban, but that didn't make our brand of war making any less brutal, just more civilized. As General Sherman once said, all war is hell.   Randy and I were four years apart in age, but were very close. Me being a sailor and him a Marine made for a persistent, yet friendly rivalry. When we got together, words like 'squid' and 'jarhead' regularly passed between us, but always in jest and with great affection. It made no difference that I was an officer, and he wasn't, since we never crossed paths in any military setting. At family gatherings, the only rank either of us answered to was "brother"--as in big brother and little brother. Though I outranked him, I respected and deeply admired my brother for the job he did. In a shooting war, it was men like Randy whose boots hit the ground and carried them into the thick of it. Though as his brother, I also held my breath and worried a lot, just as our mother did. Text Copyright, G. S. Treakle, 2023