Another bump
Yesterday I found out (via Facebook, which I almost never use for myself, but which I keep open so I can track my kids and keep up with select others) that a former member of my old Army Reserve unit had been killed in a civilian accident. This was something of a jolt, for several reasons.
First and most obvious … well, I don’t really have to explain it. Someone you used to know has died. That’s going to feel at least a little weird to anybody.
Second is sort of about me. I joined my unit in September 2002, because I could tell by the news that we would almost certainly be going back into Iraq soon. By the end of November, I was in a retraining course at a base in California; by the end of January, I was on a bus to Fort Bragg with the rest of my unit, to prepare for our deployment overseas. My new unit operated primarily in three-man teams; the man I’ve been talking about - call him Badger - was team leader of the one I was assigned to. Before we left Bragg, though, I had been transferred to a different team, so I never served under Badger in the field. So, okay, I was the third man on two different three-man teams, meaning five of us in total.
In 2008, I found out that the young man who had been Badger’s assistant team leader had killed himself. During my second Iraq tour, 2009-10, I heard that the team chief of my second team had died of a heart attack. (During that first tour, the man was three years younger than me and looked fifteen years older.) Now Badger himself is gone, too. Except for me, there’s only one of us left, and I don’t even really know about him, in that I haven’t seen or heard from him in a dozen years. I was the oldest man in the company the day I walked in the door, and remained so till I retired; how am I suddenly in contention for Lone Survivor?
Third was also to do with age. The obituary listed Badger as 43 years old. When we met, he wasn’t even 30 yet. How did so much time go by without me noticing it?
And I suppose I could list a fourth, though that one didn’t occur to me till just now. Three men I met through the Army, knew throughout a wartime deployment, and all gone now outside of combat.
No idea what conclusions to draw from any of that. It just keeps feeling strange.