Commentary: The Big Chill

Running the gauntlet of life

I’m reminded of a time when Graham Nash (of the musical band Crosby, Stills and Nash) visited Winchester Cathedral at Hampshire, England. He noticed a gravestone that caused him to ponder a bit and wrote down what eventually became lyrics to the song, ‘Winchester Cathedral,’

“I was standing on the grave of a soldier that died in 1799, and the date he died was a birthday, and I noticed it was mine. My head didn’t know just who I was, and I was spinning back in time.” I’ll stop there but suffice it to say this song will catch your attention. The grave at Graham’s feet was that of a young lieutenant killed in battle a couple hundred years before. This young officer had a long and promising life in front of him but collided with a bullet that changed all that. Essentially, the grave marker is all that remains of this person and countless others just like him – to include you and I one day.

This song’s tempo is rather slow but does get in a hurry now and again. My team of soldiers and I used to increase the volume during the high tempo parts of the song and speed down the streets of Kunduz and Kandahar to minimize the chances of getting shot. I kept thinking, I wonder if this officer had the same adventuresome life experiences that I had replete with romantic trysts, the sting of battle and other adrenaline filled excursions before he went down? No one alive today has any idea of that lieutenant’s life experiences, nor will they know any of mine. All that he experienced and knew and all the knowledge he accumulated died with him. I was quite sure I was going to end up just like him on several occasions in various conflict zones. A frequent musing went something like this, “Why didn’t I choose a different path in life – perhaps one down a more lead-free lane.”

I tried to be normal but the alternative lifestyle of being a normal person and driving back and forth to work amongst the masses was not appealing either, so what do you do? If you hold on too tight, you’ll have a dismal existence, so you may as well come to grips with your mortality and just go for it. It’s not the years in your life but the life in your years I keep telling myself. Everyone you know will cease to exist one day soon, so enjoy the ride while you can. That is the reality for all of us.

Getting back to our soldier at the Cathedral for a moment. Aside from a gravestone, there is no record that his family, or his friends ever existed or any memory of the sunny days or cool things they witnessed. One simply lives and dies, and the world turns, and it will continue to do so with no regard to how self-centered and concerned about the here and now that we may be.

Join me for a quick mind melt. For example, if you are 50 years old today, it is unlikely that anyone will speak your name 50 years from now, nor will they speak the name of anyone you associated with 75 years from now. Fifty years ago, is only 1973. Think about it for a minute. How often do you think about any of your relatives or friends that died over 50 years ago? First, you must be about 60 years old to even have known them at all. If their closest friends aren’t thinking about them – who is? It’s a rhetorical question. The year 1799 was 220 years ago. Countless generations of people have walked the earth before and after. One day 200 years from now, in the year 2223 someone will look at your gravestone and wonder the same. In short, it really comes down to “Out with the old and in with the new and what you do during your brief excursion on earth is largely up to you.”

As Stephen Jobs once said, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart. No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it, and that is how it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It’s life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

Hunter S. Thompson sort of reflects the road I’ve taken, although my parents oriented me along a proper azimuth with a healthy dose of Sunday School during my developmental years. Nowadays, my friends tell me I have more lives than a cat and some say, “God must be watching over you.” So, I’ve got that going for me – which is nice. Many of the people around me were not so fortunate though. Death is always close. The end of “your run” is always just a foot away. Ponder that the next time you are traveling down Route 340 at night.

While in Afghanistan in 2011, the Taliban blew up the front gate of our compound and poured through the breach throwing grenades and shooting people. The initial explosion knocked out all the power and scattered body parts all over the place. I had been out running around the compound for physical training earlier that morning and was getting dressed when the explosion occurred. As I dropped down to the floor in the dark to find my eyeglasses, a stream of bullets stitched across the walls of my room. Had I been standing – I wouldn’t be writing this. That’s the difference in life and death. Most of it is chance. There’s an old saying, “I’d rather be lucky than good.” Often luck will save a man. It did that day.

In another instance, I missed the doomed ‘Lockerbie flight’ on 21 December 1988 because of delayed dry-cleaning in the little town of Swaebisch Gmuend, Germany. With nothing to wear on my two-week journey home, I changed my flight to the following day. Otherwise, my originally scheduled connecting flight from London Heathrow to JFK in New York was the flight that blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland.

Picture from YouTube. Sky Limited. June 30, 2019

In fact, my friends in Charlotte, NC saw my name amongst the list of dead in the USA Today paper on Christmas Eve and called my house to offer condolences. They were rather elated when I answered the phone. Countless families and acquaintances of those killed experienced a horrible Christmas in December 1988. The gauntlet of life is strewn with potholes and chance. Sometimes the ride is relatively easy and other times – it’s incredibly remarkable and sometimes it’s short. Sometimes your run gets interrupted prematurely and sometimes you can sustain life for 5 score.

One last story regarding the gauntlet of life. I was introduced to members of the Kaiserslautern Ski Club over Veterans Day weekend in the year 2000. We were all there to go skiing on a glacier in the little town of Kaprun, Austria – one of few places in Europe with skiing that early in the season. On Friday, the 10^th of November I met a father and his son who were members of the ski club. We were playing water polo in the lodge pool that evening. They were celebrating his son’s birthday. His mother and other siblings were unable to come along. The following morning (November 11^th), we were in a cue boarding the monorail-like train for an ascent into the mountain tunnel to the glacier at the top. At the last moment, my shoestring came untied and I stopped to tie it. That 10 second pause caused me to miss the train. They were the last ones on the train as it reached capacity, and I was forced to wait for a follow-on train.

I was the only one in my little group that didn’t get on that train. Within 10 minutes, 155 people on that train were dead. An unauthorized kerosene heater had leaked over time in the driver’s compartment and somehow caught fire after the train entered the mountain tunnel. Fire rapidly spread through the polyurethane-lined train. The skiers were trapped in the tunnel and were incinerated or died of smoke inhalation. Later that evening, I had the painful experience of informing the wife that her husband and son were killed in what became known as the Kaprun Ski Disaster. [Caption by; BBC News. Europe] For her family, that day will live in infamy and their family will never be the same. For me, after more than 20 years since Kaprun, I’m still navigating my way through the gauntlet of life hoping to arrive in the grave worn out and reveling in all the unreal experiences a full life has afforded me. But as alluded to earlier, no one will have any idea of those experiences fifty years from now. Just a tombstone with the remnants of a dead soldier below it. As the French say, C’est la vie…..(such is life)