The Idea Blog

One of my golf pals, David Tanner, has a son, Christopher, serving in Iraq. (Here’s Christopher’s Facebook page.) Every once in a while, Christopher posts an email for his family, and often David forwards it to some of his friends. I’m lucky to have received this one.

I offer one anecdote from Christopher’s post. As some of you know, I’m working on my own storytelling skills. In trying rid myself of PowerPoint bulletology, I strive to improve my own ability to tell a story without props, without slides, without, er, bullets. I could learn a lot from Christopher (about a lot of things).

Here you go:

“My platoon was given the mission to find and rescue [a] downed American. We would not have any overhead cover, and no one would be able to support us due to the severity of the storm. [An earlier paragraph details how crippling a desert sandstorm can be for all operations.] All we would have to go off of was the bird’s last known position before it disappeared off the radar and the emergency GPS burst sent to satellites when the helicopter’s anti-missile flares and chafe were fired by the pilots.

“So off we set into the storm, a tight wedge of vehicles, eyes straining to see spotlights through the darkness, dust and howling winds. My greatest fear as we combed the desert and the wadis, “clover-leafing” possible locations, was that in the darkness and the storm we would drive right by them, that they might be unable to signal us and get our attention. It was eerie to pass through locations in the dark of past battles and firefights - some many months ago, some only a few days ago - and to see the fresh and weathered scars of battle, to see time’s fight to slowly erase some things that cannot be washed away.

“After 18 hours in the storm and covering over 200 miles of ground, we finally came upon the wreckage just as the storm began to clear in the early hours of the morning. The aircraft had crashed hard, and there were no survivors. We recovered the bodies, destroyed sensitive equipment and secured the site until multi-national forces could be spun up to the crash site. I regret that there was nothing we could have done because the looks on my men’s tired, filthy faces showed how much they had wanted to find some one alive. I think we are still hacking up dust from that mission.

“There is a story that I am fond of telling about American soldiers that applies to this situation. On a battlefield in the Civil War, one soldier hears a wounded soldier crying out from no-man’s land between the two entrenched forces. As the first soldier rushed out to get him, his commanding officer grabs him and says, ‘Leave him. I can’t spare another man. Undeterred, the first soldier rushes out into the crossfire to the aid of the wounded soldier … not even knowing what side he fights for. Some time later the soldier’s commander finds him dragging the wounded soldier back to friendly lines, the wounded soldier dead and his own mortally wounded. He shouts, ‘Dammit, now I’ve lost two good men! The mortally wounded soldier replies with his last dying breath, ‘But sir, when I got there, he said: “I Knew You Would Come.”‘

“I’d like to think that the airmen in their last thoughts as their bird went down knew that no matter what, no matter how hard, someone was coming to get them and bring them home.”