Guest Column: The Shortest Parade
By Robert Bateman
Maj. Robert L. Bateman USA is the author of No Gun Ri: A Military History of the Korean War Incident, and edited Digital War: A View from the Front Lines. He can be reached at bateman_maj@hotmail.com.
Just a few minutes ago the call went out through my office and we all filed out the door into the corridor.
I work in a huge cubicle farm in a large office building. Dilbert would be right at home here. When we got out there, the long hallway reaching from the front of my building to the back was packed. Almost twenty feet wide, the passage was jammed along the entire length, although everyone was cramming to the walls in order to create a walkway down the center. Then the clapping started and the parade went past.
But this was no ordinary parade.
There were no clowns, no candy and no floats, and there was no band, though there were plenty of uniforms. In fact, there was little else, as both the majority of the crowd and all of those moving forward between the two lines wore the various uniforms of the United States Army, and this “parade” was taking place down corridor number three here in the Pentagon.
Not all those moving down the center were walking. Almost half of them, you see, were recent amputees. Some single, some double, some missing a hand or an arm, one leg or two. Others moving slowly in this most-unique procession visibly guarded the locations on their body where hot jagged metal recently tore holes.
These were our wounded, our brothers, and our sisters, and we were welcoming them home. This was just a small group, released for a few hours from their wards up at Walter Reed to come have chow here in the building.
A few times during their brief three-minute passage there was a faint beginning of a chant, “USA, USA, USA.” That happened twice I think. Both times it died out almost immediately. It was coming from the civilian employees from one of the many administrative offices, but not from us soldiers.
We just clapped, said, “Welcome home,” and looked into knowing eyes with a nod. Chants make us uncomfortable. We don’t need chants, we’re professionals.
I suppose by now they’ve made it across the building, up to the executive dining room where men with stars on their collars will meet with them for lunch. The tab will be picked up by the generals, of course, but that’s beside the point.
What matters is that they know, in these uncertain times, that their family will not forget them. Sometimes men who’ve been wounded, bad, forget that. Or more accurately sometimes we, the family, forget to remind them. They are, now and forever, part of the family. Wound or no wound.
It’s not easy for them. It never is.
In the wake of the American Civil War, veterans, both North and South, banded together. It took a while, about ten years actually, for the memories and the pain of combat to fade enough, but eventually these men realized that in some ways they were different. They were members of a brotherhood, and they missed their siblings. They missed having people around them who understood, who “got it.” It had nothing to do with politics. It never really does.
No, these men got together because they had things they needed to talk about in order to heal, though they would never have put it in those terms. They needed their brothers, the men who knew what it was like to march in unison on a smoke-filled field and feel the heights and depths that come with absolute stark terror and the complete elation one feels at actually surviving another day – once the danger passed.
They needed somebody to gripe with about the pain in their stumps and how annoying it was to deal with the small pieces of steel which continued to work their ways to the surface of their skin ten and twenty years after it was first violently inserted. So they banded together. In the North, it was the “Grand Army of the Republic” and in the South there were numerous groups, usually regional, until the “United Confederate Veterans” got organized in 1892.
After the Spanish-American war there was that same old need again. But, barred from the Civil War organizations, this new crop of men created their own organization, unique to their war, they called themselves the “Veterans of Foreign Wars.” That was fine, and worked for them. In 1919, another war created another, almost parallel organization, The American Legion. The impetus was generally the same in both cases.
Now we welcome home our wounded, because our dead are beyond any hail we may give them. We greet our living and we try to show them. We try to let them know that they are still among us, of us, and that we are bound by our common service forever more.
It’s a message they need to hear, again and again, because they will be missing those parts of their bodies forever, and sometimes that is a lot more “real” than anything else. It can get a man down.
So, if you’re reading this, please consider doing something. Do some small thing to remind a soldier, wounded or unwounded, that he is not forgotten. It doesn’t take much, and though at most you’ll get a semi-uncomfortable nod in acknowledgement, know this.
Even if that soldier does not thank you out loud, he appreciates it. And we that remain on the ramparts appreciate it as well, since we all serve knowing that but for the grace of God, that amputee you just thanked could be one of us, because he is one of us.
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