** If anyone is offended by anything the read here, please read to the end. If you’re still offended, please email me, for I might not’ve been as clear as I might’ve been. **

This has been a rather somber thread. That’s fitting, I suppose…except that this didn’t seem to be a somber guy.

His family, I am quite sure, would appreciate the sentiments expressed here. It all seems to’ve been very heart-felt, it pleases me to say. I’m sure that patriots around the nation would appreciate being in the company of those who express their feelings so. I just don’t know if the man about whom we’re speaking would.

Let me start off by saying that I think that the party idea had real class. This should be a clue to all of us. For me, it’s in keeping with what I know of his breed.

Speaking as someone with eight years rubbing elbows among his kind, allow me to point out that SF soldiers are not morose people. They are, by and large, hard-nosed and genuinely unsentimental people. Theirs is a hard-nosed and genuinely unsentimental line of work.

That said, his comrades I’m sure appreciated the party, as he does looking down upon it. I’m sure that he appreciates their attendance. His death would’ve left them one-gun-down for their mission that evening, and this would be a good way to make things up.

For their part, would’ve appreciated it. It celebrates life.

A practical man in harm’s way often contemplates what he needs to sort out in the event of his death. This soldier, who seems to have been practical, would’ve seen that his affairs were in order. This is often not hard for many of the sad old oft-divorced bachelors who used to people a lot of Special Forces back in my day.

He would’ve left instructions to divvy up his gear, those little “comfort items” and “high-speed” twisty-poppies that you collect over the years. Truth to tell, I doubt that, after the first rush of “Bummer…”, they’d've helped themselves, knowing their brother’s mind.

Finally, in keeping with the traditions of Special Forces mourning with which I’m familiar — and, bear in mind that, when I served, any casualties were the result of training accidents thanks to long years of Republican policies and the focus of my group’s (10th SFG) attentions — the guys on the team would’ve seen to any wife and children he’d've had, and he’d've been remembered fondly.

…but the manner in which he died would’ve come into play.

Capt. Toz died stepping out of his helicopter, mistakenly thinking that it had landed. He fell 100 or so feet, the story says. He died bravely, as he’d lived bravely. You don’t go into combat with a Special Forces team and not live bravely. Still, the manner of his death is memorable.

His death — to family, friends and collegues outside the Special Forces community — is a tragedy. To his grateful nation, it’s a humbling gift. To his buddies…well….

We had one of our officers on the PanAm flight which augered in over Locherbie, and they named a sniper range after him. Those few who knew him — you don’t always know everybody — would’ve been angry, his having been killed in such a cowardly way.

By the same token, had he died firing an M249 from either hand, up to his hips in grenade pins, as the last of his team was whisked away by medevac chopper, he’d've rightly been the subject of stories, most of them embellished, for generations of new SF’ers to come. He’d've been remembered as the embodiment of the “steely-eyed killer”…a moniker which cuts *BOTH* ways, depending on whether you’d earned it or you’d only been a “profiler”…a flash of profile to make folks think you’re dangerous. The true hero is spoken of in almost worshipful, hushed tones.

If you’d've been killed any other way, especially if you’d contributed to the event, you’d've run into what can only be described as the gallows-humor of SF.

SF guys make fun of *EVERYTHING*, including dead comrades. Not all do, and some guys resist, feeling losses more keenly than others. The *SURE* thing to bring this phenomenon to a head would be if the command structure forbade it, if the hated newspapers would’ve commented on it in some way…these guys are often anarchists when it comes to authority, when that authority feels itself too important.

They woul’d've also begun telling stories if they felt that they had your permission by the way you lived your life.

We had a guy who fell hundreds of feet to his death during a training jump. The guy had been on my promotion board to Sergeant. For years afterwards, guys who didn’t even know him had heard the story of his fall, and of the guy who’d entangled parachutes with him and who’d survived. That guy was a friend of mine, and who wouldn’t join in joking himself…but “hit your arch”, a skydiving term, was generally a clue that someone was talking about the fatal accident.

There was an *OLD* time SFer who, by the time in his career that I knew him, was close to retirement and an unapologetic drunk. He had a glass eye. He’d lost it in Vietnam. He was guiding a small aircraft into his g-camp’s airfield, as the story was told to me, and wasn’t paying attention. He walked into the pitot tube on the wing — a long, sharp metal cigar-tube-like affair which collects air in flight to feed your instruments airspeed, altitude, etc. — and it plucked the eye out.

He was a *WELL* know and much-respected soldier, one of the only men I heard *OTHER* old-timers refer to unsarcastically as a “war hero”. His service record and potential for further valor — and probably a *LOT* of advocacy by team mates and former commanders — kept him on active duty until he was hardly able to stand anymore. At the one of his many, many retirement parties, I saw him low-crawl across the bar and pop his glass eye — he had several, one with a Special Forces “De Oppresso Liber” crest where the pupil would be — into the drink of an unsuspecting female attendee. It was one of his favorite jokes.

Still…brave, colorful, ultimately sad as a man lost in drink, he was beloved by many…as attested to by the fact that the story of his losing his eye was told again and again…in the loving way that SF’ers have of telling it…usually with the word “bonehead” appearing prominently.

His “bonehead play” wasn’t fatal, but it goes toward the point I’m trying to make…that how one lives his life, the value one has to people who *REALLY* count on you, goes a long ways towards your having some *REALLY* embarrassing stories told about you. This can seem cruel to outsiders…unsettling bravado to others…but it’s a way of expressing loss to the men on the inside.

You joke because you care for the people you work with. The more you care, the more savagely and more strenuously you joke.

You have an emotional investment in a job which takes you away from comfort and your family, often causing rifts and divorces in families, and it’s common for guys in SF to *REALLY* like those they like and to *REALLY* dislike those they feel have done them wrong. They’re not effusive or demostrative…those feelings just go deep.

I take away from this whole sad story two things:

1) I couldn’t help but think of how the manner of this fellow’s passing might be dealt with by some of his friends in Group, not those there but those around him. From what I’ve read of him, he’d've been the first to make a crack.

2) That the SF that I knew is still alive and well, as evidenced by his wanting there to be a party. These men may mourn, but they *REALLY* prefer to remember and celebrate their friends lives, not dwell upon how there’s now one fewer trustworthy, well-trained and capable man to cover their backs.

The way to celebrate an SF soldier’s passing isn’t with high words or brass bands, medals or memorials. It’s with a good wake. Tell a few stories, especially those which would embarrass him, and then get dancing- and blurry-drunk. Then, thereafter, you remember the man with gratitude, not sadness.

It isn’t practical to dwell on death. More will die tomorrow.

Puritan1648 on November 20, 2006 at 2:40 PM