...and I'm not sure what set that ceremony apart.
Patrick Air Force Base.
Cocoa Beach Florida. 1992/3.
Base Honor Guard.
It was that part of my military career where I was going to a LOT of funerals.
Thanks to the Persian Gulf War cleaning out the 2nd MOB, and Hurricane Andrew decimating the honor guards at Homestead, anyone lucky enough to already be on honor guard could manage to make it a full time job, if you had an understanding boss.
I did. Lonnie was awesome.
Let me sign up for as many funerals as I wanted. There were hundreds. Snowbirds die at an alarming rate, and many have earned rights to full military honors.
The busiest day I remember had 7 funerals. They were back to back to back and involved a chopper flight at one point. Hopped on just north of Daytona Beach, rode the Chinook to a pad just south of Miami.
There are four basic honors a military honor guard at the base level provides:
1. pall bearing
2. 21-gun salute
3. taps
4. flag presentation
From the front end -- they are dignified, impressive components, all of them. people rarely join honor guard in a funeral zone for the ribbon. a few like me, were trying to get out of work, but most are the extremely patriotic, who are there to honor the history.
i wasn't one of those at first. i just like the precision of it all.
The snaps, spats, and aiguillettes, adding a crispy flair to the most plain-jane dress uniform in the Pentagon's closet.
The specialized drill routines, formulated for funerals, and practiced on a grassy field until they happened silently, flawlessly, without need for an uttered command.
The strangled rifles. M1s with seven-blank cartridges and metal-blocked muzzles.
I remember a meeting -- something at the beginning of summer "season" when old Soldiers, and Marines with permission, and Airmen headed for the wild blue yonder, and Sailors bound for following seas typically start to line up for their procession from the Sunshine State.
We talked about the tempo of the ceremonies, and how each was a family's last memory of a departing loved one, and how one day it would be us in the coffin.
And then it started. Day after grinding day of strapping the straps, buttoning the buttons, wiping off the dust, and climbing on the bus.
Opening the hearse, sliding the coffin out, bracing for that moment when the trailing edge slipped off the roller and we were left at center stage to determine if we'd calculated enough muscle power for the job, trudging to the green tent, navigating around the ever-present shovels sticking out of a mound of dirt, occasionally straining to lift a particularly heavy coffins onto the brass frame.
unhooking rifles, drilling to port arms, waiting through a graveside eulogy, watching a widow cry, soundlessly shifting port to ready to aim.
holding it.
waiting for the command.
!!!!!!!!!!FIRE!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!FIRE!!!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!FIRE!!!!!!!!!!
it ALWAYS made the widow or the mother or the baby jump.
Then resting your cheek to the butt of the rifle and waiting for taps.
He was part of the team, but never traveled with us.
Never checked in, never said hello. He was a civilian bugler. I guess he'd been Air Force at one point or another ... but I don't actually ever remember meeting him.
He was always behind the trees, or over the hill. And he was dependable like the sunset. A few beats after the last rifle report ... he invisibly commandeered center stage.
His rendition of TAPS still echoes through my memory. He liked to let taps ... waft ... with the wind.
Come hauntingly over the hill on a hot-assed blast of Florida summer.
They were never real people to me at first -- the ones in the coffins. They were names and ranks, and special instructions:
"deceased is obese, please be aware that the coffin may require reinforced manpower."
"deceased is believed to have committed suicide. mother and wife are sworn enemies. mother has vowed to kill wife at gravesite ... to 'send daughter-in-law to hell with her son' ... additional security may be prudent."
When you lift the flag off a coffin, and the six (...or two) of you start to snap it into a triangle fit for immortality in a living room, it feels like folding a spread with your mother. Except the creases matter.
And when you lean over to the grieving widow with that folded flag in hand, you stiffly present it to her with a solemn face. You look directly at her eyes. You do not blink, and you say:
"On behalf of the President of the United States, the Department of the Air Force, and a grateful nation, we offer this flag for the faithful and dedicated service of **
That moment always matters. Sometimes the widow, or mother, or daughter-I cannot ever remember giving a flag to a man--returns your stare, and you can see a lifetime of twisting emotions behind her pupils. Sometimes she wants to kill you. Sometimes she wants to hug you. She ALWAYS half-clears her throat, and manages a hoarse "thankyou."
It was 18 months of funeral after funeral after funeral after funeral. From Jacksonville to the Keys, South of Tampa to Homestead.
Two stick out.
Christmas, 1993. We got a request from the wife of a Retired Lieutenant Colonel for military honors on his December 25th burial in Miami. We couldn't get an entire team together, but a Staff Sergeant and I volunteered to go present a flag.
We talked all the way down, listening to a CD of Sade's No Ordinary Love. Hey, it was Christmas~
It was ... a sad little funeral. Just a widow, a rabbi, and some random guy who looked like either an old friend, or a drinking buddy from the bar. The Staff Sergeant made the presentation. The wife cried then handed each of us an envelope.
"I know it's Christmas. I know you didn't have to do this. It means a lot to me, and I know it would have meant a lot to him," she said.
She wouldn't take the envelopes back.
We were silent all the way back up I-95.
The second was when I cried.
I still have no idea WHY that one hit me so hard. I didn't know him. Didn't think his family looked particularly like mine, or like someone I knew. Wasn't having a bad day, guns didn't jam, coffee was hot. We didn't get lost finding the grave site.
I was on the rifle detail. We had seven that day. (Sometimes you have three, and fire 7 rounds each...)
And I was standing there on a hill, at a cemetery in Orlando, Florida that is the final resting place for thousands of vets ... hundreds of whom I'd honored personally...
And we fired the volleys, and my cheek was resting on the stock of my impotent but noisy gun ... and I had 3 funerals left that day, and a bead of sweat ran down out of my bus driver hat into my eye ... and I couldn't wipe it off because "FIRE" position is like attention...
And taps started wafting up the hill and around the trees. And for some reason ... for the first time ... i actually ... HEARD it.
There's no reason you should know taps ... but, here are the words in case you one day get curious.
“Day is done, gone the sun
From the lake, from the hills, from the sky
All is well, safely rest;
God is nigh.”
And something about the way it pedaled up that incline, and rested between the crests of two hills ... bouncing back and forth on itself so that 'gone the sun' crashed softly into 'from the hills' and 'God is nigh' got hoisted up on 'all is well' ... caught in my throat. And for the first time I realized i was ... AT a FUNERAL.
And we were saying good-bye to someone who'd worn a uniform, possibly fought and killed for this idea of America.
And maybe he had a good experience, or a bad one.
Maybe he was a great leader of men, or a shitty supervisor.
Perhaps he saved the Pentagon money with his brilliant ideas, or maybe he was the moron who ended up demanding you buy crap you don't need the day before budget ran out because he didn't want his budget cut.
No matter who the enlisted or officer was ... this whole pomp and circus we were taking on the road every day was a trip that had been earned.
that Vet had paid in advance for the right to have me skip my unimportant job and go help move his casket from hearse to brass frame.
He'd earned a flag. A 21-gun salute. Taps.
And out of nowhere, I was crying. Not heaving sobs, just unwipeable tears at the "FIRE" position.
I'm not going to cry this Memorial Day. That once was enough.
I'm also not going to make any sort of political statement. Now isn't the time.
But I haven't ever felt that moment again, least of all on Memorial Day.
The holiday has been pretty much dumbed down to bar-b-q and baseball.
There are some 1,189,457* known American fatalities from our series of wars.
Pick one, and at LEAST roast a weinie to his or her honor.
I'm Air Force General Issue. Our tradition to the fallen involves part of verse three of our song:
Here's a toast to the host
Of those who love the vastness of the sky,
To a friend we send a message of his brother men who fly.
We drink to those who gave their all of old,
Then down we roar to score the rainbow's pot of gold.
A toast to the host of men we boast, the U.S. Air Force!
We say "here's a toast..." to our fallen comrades in arms.
On veterans day ... we celebrate the living. The men and women who have put on .. or wear .. uniforms in the nation's defense.
But Memorial Day is about the dead. All, 1-million plus of them.
To each of them, and every man or woman who knows to raise a glass ...
"Here's a toast..."
Peace,
--Stew.
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