Anyone who reads
this space, or follows we via Twitter and other media outlets generally get the
point that I rarely get political where I present a professional line of
thought, but I do tend to tell personal stories.
“The only difference
between a sea-story and a fairy-tale is that the Fairy-tale starts out ‘Once
upon a time…’, and the sea-story starts out with ‘No Shit man, this really
happened….’” -- call it a Sailor’s
proverb
At age 19, I was
assigned to the US Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Forty (NMCB-40). And I left to join them in Rota, Spain for a
seven-month deployment. When I got there
I was already restless and decided to volunteer for a detachment known as
AIRDET. It was only after that people
told me that you don’t volunteer for that one.
I was added as an alternate, and the night before they deployed I was
told to grab my gear because one of our guys had his appendix burst. The next morning, I was on a C130 with 80
other Seabees, headed for Tunisia.
The North
Detachment, was tasked with assisting in the building up road drainage
infrastructure nead Tunis, while the Southern crew, my group, were sent to the
desert near Gabes. During this time, we
added a number of things to the Tunisian landscape. One I believe I can still see on Google
Earth.
We worked and
trained with the Tunisian marines during this time and helped them to
understand how some of the construction operations worked and could be
improved. While working one of these
days I was sitting down and splicing some cable and came face to face with an
African Horned Viper. This thing
literally came out from under the tire I was sitting, between my legs, and didn’t
seem pleased at all. Two young Tunisians
saw this too and sprang into action faster than I could have imagined and sliced
the viper up with their shovels before either the snake or I could react. Afterwards their Lieutenant ‘Mohammad’
explained to me that the viper was deadly, and I told him that I fully approved
of the action taken.
Later in this
mission I was injured in a gasoline explosion that left me hospitalized for
three weeks. That’s another story but
the take away here is that when it happened two people reached me first. One of our guys Eric Peterson, and a Tunisian
Marine, one of the young men that save my life before. They helped me away from the fire and then
onto an Ambulance back to camp. In the
next 30-45 minutes a helicopter from a Tunisian airbase in Gabes arrived to
take me to their hospital for triage treatment.
A remarkable feat since they had only seven of these vehicles and they
were all down for maintenance awaiting parts when the call went out. The mechanics at the airbase made one working
helo from seven broken ones fully knowing that an American soldier was
injured. A pair of Tunisian pilots with
a cobbled-together aircraft risked their lives flying this machine, to save my
own.
At the age of 41
this whole incident is now decades old, I have been through lots of counseling and
still today suffer from PTSD from the fire itself. But this is a relevant story for me. I owe my life to two men that I can still
recall their faces but not their names, and countless others that worked in
concert and at the risk of death to save the life of an American Soldier. Without that I would never have met my wife,
had my sons or enjoyed the next 22 years in safety and health.
My point in this
story is to highlight a fault in our current political environment. I owe my life to countless Muslim men and
women that I would trust it with them again if I had to. The rhetoric in the US had come to a point
where the actions of radical elements are being used as a prod to hurt and
alienate an entire group of people, even our own citizens. We have a candidate for the US Presidency
that advocates a blanket abuse of civil rights.
Rights that I gave 8 years of my life and almost my life in service to
protect. All of us in this democratic
society are given one voice, one vote, to show the World what matters to
us. I will never tell another citizen
how to vote but I will say this, even if you have grasped my leaning, I
consider this ‘Right’ an obligation. If
you do not vote and use your voice at every opportunity, then why call yourself
a citizen. The obligation of every
citizen in the US (or any other democratic society) is to be informed in the
issues at hand and cast your vote every time.
When no best, or even good, choice presents itself; then your obligation
is to choose the lesser of two evils and strive toward the best path possible.
